Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India 9783030540968, 3030540960

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Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India Lalitha Gopalan

Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India

Lalitha Gopalan

Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India

Lalitha Gopalan Austin, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-54095-1 ISBN 978-3-030-54096-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54096-8 This print edition is for countries outside of the Indian Subcontinent. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: New People Cinema, San Francisco Cover design by eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Appa, Amma, Murali, and Krishna

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge three research fellowships that were foundational for the emergence of this book: Tagore Fellowship from the Government of India’s Ministry of Culture, Senior Long-Term Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, and Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Program Fellowship. The two-year period of research, 2013 and 2014, dedicated to the project, ‘Long, Short, Lost: Experimental Film and Video Practices in India,’ allowed for an unprecedented immersion in film and video practices. A vast archive of films, videos, links, DVDs, oral interviews, and field notes with no limits in sight has been accumulating. Obviously, one volume cannot capture the rich variety of practices. Thus, this particular book dedicates itself to long form feature films, an ocean of alternatives to mainstream cinemas. At The University of Texas at Austin, I am grateful to Dean Jay M. Bernhardt for the award of a Faculty Research Assignment (FRA) in Fall 2018, which provided the first writing retreat. A Provost’s Author’s Fellowship, the brainchild of the former provost, Maurie McInnis, in Fall 2020, allowed for a release from teaching in the final push towards completion. I wish to acknowledge the awards of travel funds from the South Asia Institute for subsequent research trips to India. For the passage to fellowships and their continuing counsel, I convey my expansive thanks to Corey Creekmur, David Desser, Gina Marchetti, Parama Roy, Alan Tansman, Roberto Tejada, Rosie Thomas, Sharon

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Willis, and Alejandro Yarza. Alan Tansman’s invitations to teach at UC Berkeley in Spring 2009 and 2011 provided life affirming intellectual joy. Rama V. Baru, Ira Bhaskar, Kaushik Bhaumik, Ranjani Mazumdar, Harish Naraindas, Janaki Nair, and Kumkum Roy’s welcoming spirit at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) laid the groundwork for my research period in India. The intellectual community of the School of Arts and Aesthetics opened many paths of inquiry for the expansive research project. Belinder Dhanoa’s friendship, a second innings after Rochester, lit up many of my days. In no small measure, this book would not have been possible without the help of the filmmakers who generously shared their works in all kinds of formats and were gracious to carve time, despite their schedules for my visits to sets and DI studios, and to respond to my telephone calls and email correspondences. I am grateful for the gift of friendship with some of them and the book acknowledges my abiding admiration for their practice. My thanks to Aadish Keluskar, Aditya Bhattacharya, Amitabh Chakraborty, Anamika Haksar, Anup Singh, Anurag Kashyap, Arun Karthick, Ashim Ahluwalia, Babu Eshwar Prasad, Bina Paul, Chirantan Das, Deepti Gupta, Fowzia Fathima, Gurvinder Singh, Hansal Mehta, Indranil Roychoudhry, Mamta Murthy, Madhusree Dutta, K. M. Kamal, S. R. Kathir, Madhuja Mukerjee, K. U. Mohanan, Kabir Mehta, Mysskin, Nalan Kumarasamy, Nina Sugati, Nishtha Jain, Putul Mahmood, Radhika Reddy, Rajan Khosa, Rafey Mahmood, Pradipta Bhattacharyya, Ram, Ramgopal Varma, Ranjan Palit, Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), Ridham Janve, Ruchir Joshi, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, Sashikanth Ananthachari, M. Sasikumar, Saurabh Goswami, Shai Heredia, Shivam Nair, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Shumona Goel, Sidharth Srinivasan, Sriram Raghavan, Suma Josson, Sunny Joseph, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, and Thiagarajan Kumararaja. I want to single out Pinaki Banerjee for alerting me to films, screenings, and for leading me to many of the filmmakers. Conversations with Naman Ramachandran—writer, filmmaker, and film programmer—were crucial during the many stations of research and writing. Curatorial practice and film programming have been central to my own approach to scholarship, amplified further in the face of lost and marginal works. Tom Vick, Curator of Film at the Smithsonian, and Roger Garcia, director of many film festivals, stand as my ideals in the programming of Asian cinemas; their insights have influenced my own archive. Robert

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Cagle’s cinephilia and film programming talents have been my source of reference more than once. During my sojourn in Berkeley, I was fortunate to benefit from the Pacific Film Archive’s programmes curated by Steve Seid, Kathy Geritz, and Susan Oxtoby. Their support for ‘Cruel Cinema’ and ‘Other Species, Other Times,’ co-curated with Anuj Vaidya, was invaluable. It was in Berkeley that I was extremely fortunate to be invited by Ivan Jaigirdar and Anuj Vaidya to join the programming board of 3rd i Film Festival, which is by all counts the edgiest South Asian Film Festival. The collaboration and friendship with Anuj Vaidya continue to sustain me. For the pleasures of experiencing the twinning of cinephilia and dazzling writing, I thank Rob White for the days at Film Quarterly. For being part of the conversation on the continuing relevance of scholarship on films, I thank BFI Classics and Rebecca Barden. My fellow members on the Camera Obscura collective have been a source of illuminating brilliance: Lynne Joyrich, Homay King, Bliss Cua Lim, Constance Penley, Tess Takahashi, Patricia White, and Sharon Willis. At UT Austin, I have been fortunate to enjoy the support of my colleagues Sabine Hake, Nancy Schiesari, Sharon Strover, and Karin Wilkins. Their efforts towards cultivating a collegial culture demonstrate exemplary standards of feminism in the academy. Janet Staiger’s friendship has been invaluable from the minute I joined the Department of Radio-Television-Film, and I am grateful for her continuing mentorship. The South Asia Institute (SAI) has been my intellectual homebase. I wish to thank Patrick Olivelle, Janice Leoshko, and Kathryn Hansen for welcoming me into the fold. My sincere thanks to Rachel Meyer, Jeannie Cortez, and Scott Webel who hold the keys to institutional memory and more. During his tenure as the director of SAI, Kamran Ali’s unstinting support for my film programming initiatives nurtured my research, and he continues to be a generous interlocutor. I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to avail of Syed Akbar Hyder’s vast knowledge of philosophy and aesthetics during crucial moments of writing. Among the many expansive intellectual engagements with the Department of Asian Studies, I am grateful to Sung-Sheng (Yvonne) Chang for welcoming me into the world of East Asian cinemas and cultures. Her Taiwan programme supported my multiple research trips to Taipei to study its robust cinemas whose inflections course through this book and beyond.

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Colleagues at Art and Art History have been the other source of lively and critical engagements. Ann Reynolds’ intellectual friendship was lifesaving upon arrival at UT. Roberto Tejada’s presence at UT opened the world of CLAVIS (Center of Latin American Visual Studies), a universe of enchantment. Writing a book, as we all know, is a solitary endeavour. I have been lucky to be supported and rescued from many dark moments by my writing circle of friends across time zones: Elissa Marder, Meenakshi Ponnuswami, Sangeeta Ray, Scott Redford, and Ritu Vij. Jeff Peck’s daily virtual calls from Berlin, a sign of his unmitigated support, beat many a lonely day. I have been fortunate to have the support of archaic friendships with Adrián Pérez Melgosa, Darias Kothawala, Sean Miller, Ram Ranganathan, Sangeeta Tyagi, and Ajit Subramaniam, who urge me to head towards uncertain futures. This book holds the ideals of the American university: Veritas, Lumen, Cognitio. I want to recognize my students at UT Austin and from Georgetown and Berkeley for joining me in many journeys through the worlds of cinemas. From that assembly of students, I thank Robert SperryFromm for his efforts in compiling the bibliography and filmography for this book. Sachin Dheeraj Mudigonda generously offered his time and talent towards the gathering of images. Michèle Woodger’s copyediting ironed out the infelicities with a touch of, I would like to imagine, the fog of London and the air of Malta. Pamela Rogers brought her meticulousness and levity to proofreading. At Palgrave Macmillan, I thank Lina Aboujieb and Emily Wood for their support from commission to production. I want to thank the anonymous reviewer whose generous comments and suggestions guided my revisions towards a better book. As both filmmaker and scholar, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, has been my closest fellow traveler in this journey through the extensive domains of Indian cinemas. His constant encouragement and generous enthusiasm for the book has buoyed me through both research and writing. Alejandro Yarza’s fusion of cinephilia and theoretical insights have long offered the camaraderie that I could count on at every turn. His keen eye for details and generosity of time with the reading of the chapters vastly improved the book at every register.

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Roberto Tejada’s conceptual play took many forms, including the gift of friendship. His praxis of writing as a poetics of a critical cosmopolitanism moves through the fragility of our existence in the diaspora and deeply inspires my expression in the world. I have pitched my tent more than once in his vibrancy. To my parents and brothers, I utter loudly: I have finished this book!

Contents

Part I 1

Opening

2

Minding the Gap

3

Slowing Down

3 97 141

Part II 4

Bombay Noir

175

5

Tamil New Wave

209

6

Road Movie

261

7

Untitled: Amitabh Chakraborty’s Cinema

297

8

Time Out

391

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CONTENTS

Bibliography

411

Index

435

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 1.6 Fig. 1.7 Fig. 1.8 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3

Fig. 3.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1

Anamika Haksar on the set (Courtesy Anamika Haksar) Production still from Thangam (Courtesy Swarnavel Pillai) Fowzia Fathima on the set of In the Shadow of the Cobra (Courtesy Fowzia Fathima) Piyush Shah on a set (Courtesy Piyush Shah) Still from Student Film shot on a PD 170 (Courtesy Ravikiran Ayyagari) Ravikiran Ayyagari, second-year cinematography exercise in 2008 with a ARRI 35 2C (Courtesy Ravikiran Ayyagari) Still from Ashwatthama (Courtesy Pushpendra Singh) Madhusree Dutta on a set during the years at Majlis (Courtesy Madhusree Dutta) Wedding videography (Video grab) Rains across wheat fields (Courtesy Gurvinder Singh) Walking in the fog (Courtesy Gurvinder Singh) Gurvinder Singh with cinematographer Nagpaul in the train compartment (Courtesy Gurvinder Singh) Breaking into the day (Video grab) Still from Raakh (Courtesy Aditya Bhattacharya) Aditya Bhattacharya and actor Pankaj Kapur on the set of Raakh (Courtesy Aditya Bhattacharya) Night shot in Johnny Gaddaar (Courtesy Sriram Raghavan) Johnny Gaddaar (Title card, courtesy Sriram Raghavan) Still from Johnny Gaddaar (Courtesy Sriram Raghavan) Cruel Cinema Poster, 3rd i Film Series

4 17 20 22 30 32 37 40 116 152 152 153 157 178 179 193 194 196 211

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Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

6.4 6.5 6.6 7.1

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. 7.7 Fig. 7.8 Fig. 7.9

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3

S.R. Kathir and Sasikumar on the set (Production still, courtesy S.R. Kathir) S.R. Kathir at work (Courtesy S.R. Kathir) Kumararaja on the set of Aaranya Kaandam (Courtesy Kumararaja Thiagarajan) Poster for Veli designed by Pradeep Cherian (Courtesy Sashikanth Ananthachari) Poster of Kahini (Courtesy Malay Bhattacharya) Malay Bhattacharya on the set (Production still, courtesy Malay Bhattacharya). Bottom image: On the road (Production still, courtesy Malay Bhattacharya) Looking at the map (Production still, courtesy Malay Bhattacharya). Bottom image: Road stop (Production still, courtesy Malay Bhattacharya) Prakash and collage (Video grab) Production crew (Courtesy Sanal Kumar Sasidharan) Masked passengers (Courtesy Sanal Kumar Sasidharan) Sashikanth Ananthachari shooting Kaal Abhirati (Courtesy Sashikanth Ananthachari) The bed in Kaal Abhirati (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty) Waking up (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty) Couple strolling through north Kolkata (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty) Ruchir Joshi’s sketches on the bedroom wall (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty) Fakir Jalal Shah cycling (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty) Mahima and Fakir Abed (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty) Amitabh Chakraborty on the set during a break at the Sadhana Badi location (Courtesy Putul Mahmood) Amitabh Chakraborty (Director) and Putul Mahmood (Producer) with Cinematographer Rafey Mahmood (Courtesy Putul Mahmood) IWCC logo Deepti Gupta at work (Courtesy Deepti Gupta) Fowzia Fathima on the set of Ivan (Courtesy Fowzia Fathima)

216 217 228 246 265

266

268 282 284 288 308 313 314 318 321 345 349 353

359 393 394 402

Part I

CHAPTER 1

Opening

Anamika Haksar’s film Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon/Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis (2018) first appeared on my radar as a recommendation from filmmaker Soumitra Ranade, who had recently completed its virtual special effects (VFX) at his post-production studio Paperboat in January 2018.1 Following up on email introductions and requests, Haksar sent me a link to the film—I was floored by what I was watching, a work like no other I had seen before, unclassifiable. A well-established theatre aficionado, Haksar’s first venture into filmmaking after a short course at Mumbai’s Digital Academy has her undoing conventions in unruly ways regarding long routinized format disciplines: live action footage mixes with animation in a film that shows us an unprecedented take on life in the old Delhi through the eyes of three working-class protagonists. A simple black and white opening title card declares that ‘the film is culled from among interviews and dreams of pickpockets, street vendors, small-scale factory workers, daily wage earners, domestic workers, loaders, rickshaw pullers, and many others labouring in the city of Shahjahanabad, Old Delhi’ (Fig. 1.1). As the film opens, fuzzy shapes, glinting slightly in the darkness, are brought into focus to reveal the end of a drainpipe dripping waste into

Thanks to Bogdan Perzynski ´ for encouraging to me to think of this chapter as an opening to the explorations in the book. Hence, the title. © The Author(s) 2020 L. Gopalan, Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54096-8_1

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Fig. 1.1 Anamika Haksar on the set (Courtesy Anamika Haksar)

a shallow pool. Off-screen, we hear a low decibel volley of swears— ‘whore…! bastard…!’—speeded up to convey the artifice of a recording, which, when paired with image, matches the vibrating movements of swirling sewage slush. In the darkness of night, draped in yellow filters, the camera moves away from this image of waste and the sounds of swearing, to embark on a flamboyant sweep, realized through its position on a crane or on an extended jib. Stationed high above the nightscape, the camera records a street flooded with the glow of sodium vapour lamps and the sounds of traffic that cannot arouse a group of rickshaw pullers from their deep sleep, their bodies stretched out on their carriages. As the camera moves leftwards over a mesh of hanging wires, into the upper floor of an open dwelling, it captures more bodies lying close to each other, a fraternity of slumber. We will subsequently follow the adventures of three friends: the pickpocket Patry, the food seller Chadami, and the day labourer Lal Bihari. In this introductory moment we scope across scenes of exhausted sleep of the working poor, whose resting spots are nested in the nooks and crannies of Old Delhi.

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5

Settling on one visage, the film breaks out of this simulation of realism to insert a cut-out animation of marigolds, in a vertical drop, showering over a man’s body. As the camera moves upwards—this too is a simulation of movement executed in post-production with an animation programme—to the accompaniment of music that we have learned to associate with Hindu religious chimes in the television era, it rests on a cut-out of a calendar print of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, whose eyes blink to suggest vitality. This pacific figure of benevolence and bounty is then poked unceremoniously in the cheek by a streaming red cut-out, entering from frame left, which inevitably turns the goddess’s beatific smile into a frown. On the soundtrack we hear the piping in of the left-wing anthem, L’Internationale, sung in Hindi. The camera moves leftwards to a full red screen and onwards to an outline of a long red flag unfurling. We now behold a scene composed of tricks of scale: an outsized man steering a huge cut-out of an unfurled flag, looming large above a miniature city plaza, aglow with torches and dotted with a rally of— presumably—workers. As we hit the end of the first stanza, we are back in the live action world of the rickshaw drivers where Chadami has been roused from slumber and is miffed at his neighbour, Lal Bihari, for having hijacked this dream of divine bounty and the worker’s anthem. Barely into the first five minutes of the film, we have stepped into a bizarre canvas of vividly contrasting visual effects, achieved through digital compositing.2 Further along in the film, we see a push cart loader, weary from the load and summer heat, lean against a high pile of sacks. Slowly, a stopmotion animation simulation of grass spreading to fields over the sacks, conveys his daydream of the village he left for the city as a migrant labourer. Another delightful moment sees the workers winning a moment of victory by imagining their cruel supervisor—who yells out orders from a divan in his office on the veranda of a godown—as a miniature ratman yelling inside a large bottle. We are in the midst of a cinema of the digital age, which the film conveys from production to distribution. But rather than choose to recapitulate to realism drawn in terms of analogue, or simulations of digital animation, the film opts for a third way that deploys digital compositing to play with different planes: Euclidean depths alongside flat perspectives of cut-outs.3 Towards the end of the film, when we are eager to see the horse being taken out for a treat of jalebis, as the title has promised, the film descends into digital glitches. These glitches give way to another effect, a rearrangement of pixels, which presents us with an image of the three friends

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lounging close to each other with sounds of shattering glass on the soundtrack. Shards as cut-outs spill out to reveal smaller and smaller scenes in a multitude of screens across the frame. To clarify, this glitching is strictly a simulation, a throwback to the early 2000s when digital signals and packaging would suffer from an uneven distribution of electricity. Here this is revived as an effect rather than being an error or bug—a distinction I borrow from Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin who, unaware of digital processing in India, seemed to have drawn attention to one of its possible manifestations4 : Artefacts that look like glitches do not always result from an error. What users might perceive as ‘glitchy,’ can arise from a normally working function of a program. Sometimes these might originate from technical limitations, such as low image-processing speed or low bandwidth when displaying video. (111)

At other moments in the film, I felt as if I had I wandered into a gallery work of video art, where frames are cut horizontally to have different scenes of action—a vertical pile up that has us scanning up and down the frame as the film itself moves horizontally.5 Given Haksar’s career as a theatre director, the proximity to video performance art seems appropriate and here we are in the shadow of theatre as well.6 On this close association with theatre performance, as it has undergone revisions (most evident in Haksar’s own practice over the years with the avant-garde and experimental), I cannot but evoke André Bazin’s term ‘impure cinema’ to signal such overlaps of arts.7 Bazin’s essay was culled from near oblivion and honoured in Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev’s anthology: ‘Bazin’s article is even more topical today in the face of the spiralling mixture media that pervades our virtual space.’8 Nagib’s own essay, ‘The politics of impurity,’ recasts Bazin’s terminology in terms of intermediality that facilitates reading an impasse in the narrative.9 The insertion or evocation of the other arts may signal a narrative crisis, but it also occasions the opening of the medium of film to other representational regimes. While the moments of overt digital animation performance are reserved for day- and night-time dream sequences, a different engagement with the archaeology of cinema, film qua film, also emerges. Gang member Patru’s antics, pickpocketing and training apprentices, tenders an obvious homage to Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), the film that extolls the

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OPENING

7

performance of editing in analogue, match on action as sleights of hand, its trademark. When Patru poaches a neighbour’s trade as tourist guide through the lanes of Old Delhi, we wander into scenes of rag pickers, day labourers, and migrants, whose suffering in low-level precarious jobs flies in the face of the nostalgic walks originally designed by Jain, a fellow resident. This prank recalls similar gestures in the genre of self-reflexive and experimental ethnographic films, from Fatimah Rony’s On Cannibalism (1994) to Rungano Nyoni’s I am not a witch (2017). The idea of the frame, itself a simulated idea in the age of digital cinema, reveals itself scroll-like at times, and at other moments retreats to the characteristics of ‘cinematicity’ associated with aspect ratios of films, that allow us to reserve the right to refer to this and other films in this book as digital films.10 We cannot overlook Shahjahanabad as the chosen theatre for this film. Haksar refers to filial biography in interviews that places her grandfather’s shop in that neighbourhood as a point of return. This throwback to the director’s memory, now staged as a walking tour led by one of our protagonists, Jain, leads us to tableau vivant renditions of some of its former residents: the poet Mirza Ghalib, prominent in the waning years of the Mughal Courts in Delhi (1797–1869); and from an earlier period the shrine of Sufi Sarmad Kashani (ca. 1590–1661) whose holy tomb is in the vicinity of the grand Jama Masjid in Delhi. Syed Akbar Hyder conveys how Sarmad’s poetry and mysticism may have made him vulnerable to the reigning monarch, yet his legacy was embraced by Ghalib, and later Maulana Azad, the canonical poets of Persian, Arabic, and Urdu.11 Here, Haksar renders mysticism as only digital animation can accomplish through compositing: Jain’s gliding through the night skies on a carpet during one storytelling session is akin to narrations of Scheherazade at night; levitating and floating corpses in another room of detritus reminds me of the mystical strains in Soviet filmmakers Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Mirror (1975). The passage through the alleyways and ruins of Old Delhi, via walking tours and loitering, begets the question of the proclivity towards archaeology in digital cinemas and the impulse towards archiving that seems to beset both cinephiles and filmmakers; digital animation spatializes the evocation of these various histories. Such zigzag routes of retrieval resonate with Angela Ndalianis’ figuration of neo-baroque aesthetics in contemporary forms of American entertainment as a way of considering

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the folds of time that Haksar’s digital animation plays with.12 Ruins and wastes share propinquity, allowing us to imagine the scope of neoliberal capitalism as digital capitalism, which cannot but generate electronic waste, the by-product of this very economy.13 Ragpickers, pickpockets, day labourers, and tourist guides teem across the underbelly of this capitalism—their stories of precarity Haksar delivers with an enchantment through the very affordances of the digital cinema. After enduring a year of dormancy in 2018, Haksar’s film emerged as the cause célèbre at several film festivals, finding its niche in the nonfiction category including its recent screening at MOMA, New York, in the Avant-doc section in February 2020. Such traversing of boundaries has long been the forte of feminist art practices, artist VALIE EXPORT’s entire oeuvre for example. Haksar’s stance and her digital film recall other similar format-defying works by women artists that deserve resurrection: Suma Josson’s Janmadhinam (1997/1998) and Nina Sugati’s Chitrabhang (1975). Josson returned to India from America in the 1980s trained in creative writing. Between bouts of writing, including a novel, she embarked on filmmaking, both documentaries and a feature length film that premiered at Berlinale. Revelling in collaborations between video installation, performance art, and nouveau roman, her film’s plot deploys birthing to explore the relationship between a mother and daughter. Bina Paul, film programme director of the Kerala International Film Festival (KIFF), recommended Josson’s film to me knowing that I was familiar with her documentary work, but not this orphaned piece.14 A single 35mm, German subtitled copy of Janmadhinam is stored at the Arsenal archives, Berlin; Josson herself is striving to access a digital copy from a hard drive version whose formats have reached obsolescence. From a different place of practice, Sugati returned to India from the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) and set on a journey to discover rural India, which had her producing a film whose blending of audio and image placed it between the personal, documentary, and feature film. Sugati has been feted at Experimenta Film Festival (2011) as a pioneering experimental filmmaker by Shai Heredia. Yet, her film qua film currently only has an analogue VHS life and it has been left to Sugati’s wherewithal to rework it into a digital format. Haksar’s film, in contrast, has been rescued by the burgeoning of film festivals in the digital age that neither of the other two works had at their disposal at the time.

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Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon/Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis ’s bending of time and blending of formats through digital compositing display the confidence to not demarcate live action sections from special effects, as was the prevailing inclination to do so from the 1990s and into the early 2000s.15 Almost two decades later, such demarcations are now irrelevant, as we view in Haksar’s film. Rather, the affordances of the digital have veered towards differing planes of actions, suggesting a third way as response to the uneven and unequal distribution of resources in global capitalism. The impulse towards archaeology, by staging tableau vivant performances among the ruins of Delhi, a mise en abyme effect, invites my own archaeology of lost or partially orphaned works, as one of the forceful commitments in this book. Equally attuned are the chapters to the practice of retrieval in the large archive of cinemas across world cultures, both sound and image, that seem to inflect the practices of many of the filmmakers discussed here, as performances of memory in the digital age. Digitally born feature films are placed alongside celluloid works now enjoying an afterlife in their online versions, however compromised their aspect ratios are; digital restoration has bestowed a second life on a few films as well.16 As wide as the digital ‘archive’ is online, we have experienced digital ephemerality and questionable provenance too: uploaded works disappear, ripped films are uploaded, bit torrented works are reconfigured, films are re-edited, online streaming services sever contracts, and incorrect attributions abound. These are just a few of the handicaps of watching feature films online. While I cannot imagine giving up the quest for perfect viewing conditions in both my teaching and scholarship, feature films continue to draw a viewership online, however compromised their materiality. This book enjoys the advantage of pioneering scholarship in Cinema Studies whose alertness to the variances of the digital has shifted the ways in which we think of the moving image—both ontologies and epistemologies have been adjusted, expanded, and revised in over two decades.17 From the arena of broad speculations, I have kept my closest companionship with scholars whose writing about formats and poetics of the moving image have been finessed by digital affordances. As one of the earliest writers to move from film to video art, Raymond Bellour retained the precision and elegance that were the hallmark of his writings on narrative films, in what we can now consider as being marked by analogue preconditions; a reminder of the challenges to the commitment to close readings

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in an age before video players.18 His use of ‘passage’ as tunnelling between analogue and digital has been a productive reminder of many points that sketch a multi-cursal approach as narrative cinema moves from one format to another and opens relationships to analogue photography, video art, and digital moving image. In an extraordinary compendium of essays that move from Dziga Vertov to Abbas Kiarostami’s films, and walks into a gallery installation of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second attends to cinema’s preoccupation with stillness and movement in the age of digital.19 My approach to engaging with cinemas of India has entailed being attuned to format shifts like no other, an attentiveness that has been sharpened by Ágnes Peth˝ o’s expansive scholarship and projects on intermediality.20 Taking my cue from Lev Manovich and Marsha Kinder on the modular structuring of storytelling that blossoms with the advent of computers and digital cinemas, I have embraced that format to diagram this introduction to digital film cultures in India.21 To consider a kaleidoscope-like effect, yet commit to the linear unfolding of pages of a book, involves acknowledging radial lines of enquiry that run in various directions when reading online versions of print books. Readers exploit embedded footnotes and hyperlinks that run counter to notions of flipping pages and no longer beholden to a linear unravelling. Such new reading habits have revived many forms of writing, long suppressed, and are now transforming in myriad ways. To move sideways, laterally, and across medias and histories is one such undertaking that models this introduction, whose assumed dilatory structuring and vastness acknowledges the expansiveness of digital cinemas.

Raqs Media Collective Social media now keeps moving between desires of annihilation and joyful praise of acts of courage and generosity. We live in a fairly delirious world – dark but filled with potential to create amazing forms of life. —Raqs Media Collective22

Delhi-based, globally circulating, Raqs Media Collective (Raqs) has as capacious a practice as any of the various medias we know and imagine. As artists, curators, philosophers, and tricksters, Raqs wanders through galleries, makeshift performance spaces, seminar tables, online sites, tea

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breaks, and draws on conversations as daily practice. Proclaimed as a collective since 1992, when they met as graduate students at Jamia Millia Islamia University, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta ride as ‘an ensemble’ forging affinities—that may arise at their studio table at Shapur Jat, Delhi, and morph into collaborations across the globe—stretching into a formidable list that rails against received ideas of art practice: architects, programmers, theatre directors, sound artists, dead writers, fictional authors, ghost writers, and others. I am calling on them, for this book, as a nodal for both secreting and bonding the affordances of the digital. From the vantage point of the present, Raqs’ practice has moved away from film and cinema, yet their invitations to theorists and video artists to consider the long form film in their curatorial ventures reveal their affection for the practice of their own origin. They did, after all, make television documentaries for the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) and assembled a book of writings culled from filmmakers on their practice.23 Dialling back to the close of the last century, Raqs’ collaboration with two scholars at The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)—film historian Ravi Vasudevan and media theorist Ravi Sundaram—would conjure Sarai, a digital lab whose experiments and projects on all matters digital marks it as a primogenitor whose energies are far from depleted to date. Conceived of in 1998, Raqs’ role with the Sarai Initiative lasted until 2012, a period that coincides with the dispersal of the digital across the mediascape in India. To name their digital lab ‘Sarai’ was to evoke the Persian word for shelters offered to travellers that have dotted the landscape of Delhi since the medieval times en route to Central Asia. In an interview with Rhizome, they expound on their appropriation of this term24 : The Sarai Initiative interprets this sense of the word ‘sarai’ to mean a very public space here different intellectual, creative and activist energies can intersect in an open and dynamic manner so as to give rise to an imaginative reconstitution of urban public culture, new/old media practice, research and critical cultural intervention.

In their various interviews, Raqs refers to the 1990s as wrecked by political antagonisms that culminated with India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear testing in 1998, provoking a groundswell of activism that led to reimagining:

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a very public space, where different intellectual, creative, and activist energies could intersect in an open and dynamic manner to give rise to an imaginative reconstitution of urban public culture, new/old media practice, research, and critical cultural intervention. (De Wachter)25

Inspired by the wide embrace of new technologies and public telephone booths, Raqs narrates in their Rhizome interview how the Sarai media lab started with ‘five multimedia computer stations’ with a commitment to free software on Linux machines: We are interested in Free Software not only because it makes economic sense in an Indian context to not spend a lot of money on expensive proprietary software, but also because we believe there are crucial issues of cultural freedom and creativity that are at stake here. A monocultural domination of Microsoft, or any form of proprietary software, is as lethal for the sustenance of the dynamism and diversity of software culture(s) as the domination of Monsanto seeds is to farming.26

The continuous vigilance and pushback against software monopolies reveal a collaboration with Ravi Sundaram’s interests in cultures of piracy and the burgeoning grey market for assembling computers.27 Raqs during its partnership with Sarai proposed a ‘digital commons’ through the Open Platform for Unlimited Signification (OPUS): ‘an online space for people, machines, and codes to play and work together—to share, create and transform images, sounds, videos, and texts.’28 Despite their incursions and embrace of ‘new media’ they have been insistent ‘about innovative re-combinations between “old” and “new” media.’29 The interviews with Rhizome were in the thick of their partnership with Sarai, and the most tactile of outputs are the Sarai Readers—which was then on its second volume—nine in total before they closed that chapter of collaboration with Sarai at CSDS. In their subsequent interview with De Wachter, Raqs would surmise: The Sarai experience gave us an unbounded vision. We could think about research as an artistic act, and abolish (in our own practice) any divisions of hierarchies between theory and practice, between artistic and intellectual labour. (60)

Their claims would be most evident in the very composition of each of the Sarai Readers where book design vies with the widest and wildest

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table of contents on medias. Sarai continues to thrive and among the many projects I want to recognize is the launching of the journal Bioscope: Screen Cultures of South Asia by Ravi Vasudevan and Rosie Thomas, whose own media lab at the University of Westminster, CREAM, is a precursor of practice-based research in the arts of moving image. With a decade of issues behind it, Bioscope has been pushing the consideration of post-national screen cultures in boundless ways that echo Raqs’ partnership with Sarai, which included screenings, talks, seminars, and exhibitions. In my conversation with Raqs, Jebeesh Bagchi recalled that Sarai opened and encouraged discussions of process and craft with filmmakers and artists, a nudge that hitherto had been absent at such events. The most obvious record of their attempts are Raqs’ interviews with cinematographers who worked in both feature and documentary films, available online. Raqs’ own first works as filmmakers are evoked in their Rhizome interview: a lost short 16mm and unfinished essay film. The ubiquity of computers was accompanied by other losses—several computer crashes in the early 1990s entailed losses of early notes on several unrealized projects, circumstances that they recall in their dialogue with Moinak Biswas (2011).30 These conditions of living with loss put a fine point on the ephemerality of data-based practice that undergirds digital production, which when written from non-dominant centres of products reveals the limits of backups and storage that need to be reckoned with as well. Lost works, deteriorating films, and damaged video form the bedrock of my own archives for this book, an approach that allows me to claim Raqs’ own practice as fellow travellers. Their stance against holding on to a national-modern practice offers another entrée to read this book as destabilizing national cinemas altogether. The films that I hold up close and arrange in each of the chapters range from lost, marginal, fringe to critically acclaimed, an arrangement that I suggest considers the continency of the archive when held against the surety of categories in Film Studies, which undoubtedly need continual revising. ‘Road Movie,’ Chapter 6 of this book, presents a tripartite structure that starts with a rapidly deteriorating Bengali film by Malay Bhattacharya, Kahini (1997); proceeds to Gaali Beeja/Wind Seed (2015), a digital born Kannada film by the artist Babu Eshwar Prasad; and closes with the Malayalam Sexy Durga (2018) by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan produced by Kazcha Film Forum (Kazcha), a film society collective. Detours and by-passes are operative sign posts for this chapter. While Kazcha’s commitment

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resonates with Raqs’ own on digital commons, I cannot help my bemusement on being informed of a screening of Gaali Beeja at the Dussledorf Gallery that coincided with Raqs’ show Measuring Time in July 2018. Lines crossed, research overlaps, and serendipity are part of running into Raqs. Here, I want to evoke Raqs’ later theorizations of their practice by borrowing the term ‘off-modern’ from the former Soviet writer, artist, and theorist Svetalana Boym: ‘Being off-modern’ is inhabiting the trajectory of a ‘lateral move of the knight in a game of chess. A detour into some unexplored potentialities of the modern project.’31

Digital Dispositif: Digital Too Is Historical As singular as Haksar’s first film is, it is worth noting that she assembled a highly skilled crew—a cinematographer from Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), a costume designer from the National School of Drama (NSD), a production designer from art school, and actors from NSD—a roster that speaks to her collaboration with experts of various adjacent arts even if she was ushering them into a different practice with her personal vision. The presence of a film-school trained crew as additional collaborators reveals the persistence of a previous dispositif, a pedagogy that focused on celluloid, despite the irreversible move towards digital technologies since the mid-1990s.32 Neither film, per se, nor cinema have been retrenched, rather we have learned to parse these differences as we experience the explosion of cinema around us from theatre to gallery. To write of all these variances, instances, arrangements, and expressions demands a conference of authors and rafts of publications, and not the scope of a single book. But, not to speak or note the changing dispositifs makes for a lacklustre reading of films and the worlds that they conjure for us.33 Chapter 2, ‘Minding the Gap,’ launches a reading of the closing moments of Ketan Mehta’s Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005) as an entrée into an engagement with the first two digital born films—Pankaj Advani’s Urf Professor (2001) and Sidharth Srinivasan’s Divya Drishti (2002). As claims to being the first two digital films in Indian cinema, they beg the question as to what the process of digital production was at this juncture. With the editing process turning digital, first with Final Cut Pro followed by Adobe Premiere programmes, cameras were not far behind. Outfitting theatres for digital projection and sound followed suit. From accounts by the filmmakers themselves some details emerge. In the

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case of these first two films, according to cinematographer Chirantan Das, Urf Professor was shot on DV Cam Sony DSR 500, a camera that had just arrived in India. Sidharth Srinivasan’s Divya Drishti was shot on a Sony DCR-VX2000 mini camcorder and the process towards projection involved a throwback to celluloid: processing reverse telecine at Prasad Labs so as to convert the digital tape to celluloid format for eventual projection. Finally, the master tape was played on a DVCAM, which was hooked directly onto a projection system when it was shown at film festivals. As ubiquitous as digital has become, the move from celluloid to digital was not a single leap. Along the way, other kinds of cameras were adopted, those less expensive than celluloid and lighter than 35mm cameras. Certain of these inroads into industry standard feature films were opened from commissions for long-form features of television broadcasts and short features for cable television, attributes marking the changing mediascape of the 1990s. To evoke these moments breaks the narratives on the monopoly of digital technology and allows us to see the variances of the moving images that were celluloid, electronic, digital, video analogue, and a mix of all these, a rich mediascape that draws our attention to the scope of intermediality in feature films as it finds options beyond the celluloid rubric. One of these directions worth narrating centres on a feature film that was made on Hi-8, enjoyed festival screenings, and suffered obsolescence with the sweep of digitization: Ilaria Freccia and Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai’s Thangam (1995). After having graduated from FTII in 1981, Pillai was juggling various projects—corporate films and documentary—and was harbouring an opportunity to make a longer film. Trips home to Valuthoor, six kilometres from Ambasamudram in Tirunelveli District, were reminders of its scenic beauty of rivers, paddy fields, and ancient temples, and Pillai made a few films set in this locale—Copper River (1991), a poetic meditation on the river Tamira Bharani, and shorts for the union of women Bidi-rollers (indigenous cigarettes without filters). It was during one such assignment in 1994 that brought him home to Valuthoor and a possibility of a collaboration with Ilaria Freccia, a seasoned Italian cinematographer and filmmaker, who was exploring a commission from European Television Channel, RAI3 (Radio and Television ItalianaTre/3), a producer known for programmes on marginalized people/voices of the world.34 Charmed by the setting of Valuthoor, Freccia’s intention to capture its rich history matched Pillai’s desire to have his feature film capture it in his

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mise en scène. After a dry run of a collaboration that produced Pothigai Malai (Pillai and Freccia, 1995), they ventured into the realm of a feature film. An early promise of production from Navert, an Italian production company associated with Bertolucci’s brother, sealed the realization of the project, which did not falter even after failed financial guarantees caused them to scale back production. Freccia had arrived with a Sony Hi-8 camera (Sony 3CCD-VX3) as her workhorse, which was to serve as their main recording device.35 The shooting process revealed the hiccups of transferring technology to a different geography.36 Hi-8 tapes and a prosumer camera were fragile and had to be preserved in moderate temperatures. The hot tropical weather of Valuthoor caused equipment malfunctioning, which in turn resulted in the form of ‘dropouts’ in the exposed tapes. However, their rationale to continue deploying the camera was the advantage of tape: unlike celluloid, tapes were cheaper, and the shooting ratio higher, thus allowing room for correction of these dropouts in the process of editing. The co-production allowed for post-production facilities in Rome. A total of sixty hours of filming on Hi-8 won the attention of Simona Paggi, the editor of award-winning films: Giani Amelio’s The Stolen Children (1992) and Lamerica (1994), which won the Golden Osella at Venice and later an Oscar for Life is Beautiful (dir. Roberto Benigni, 1997). Exclaiming ‘Lavoro … lavoro,’ she was moved by the village milieu of the footage and agreed to help edit. In an editing room in the neighbourhood of the Vatican, they watched Simona arrange the footage on what was then the new Avid non-linear editing programmes, rescuing footage between the damnable dropouts in the various tapes. Sound was also a product of a constrained budget. Without external mics except for the wired lapel/lavalier mic, sound was mostly recorded through a mic in the Sony VX 3 camera. Thangam’s voice-over was recorded with a Sony Walkman recorder. Ilvio Gallo, a famous fashion videographer/editor from Milan, did additional photography and helped with post-production and sound editing in his studio in Milan. A film shot in Valuthoor with a low-end video camera was assembled in Rome into the film Thangam revolved around the life and times of a thirteen-year-old girl whose antics have us absorbed for a feature length film. Culled from real stories that Pillai had heard of a young girl, the film’s budget had them cast a young girl as the protagonist, Thangam, and her real family were doubled as her family on-screen; most of the characters are played by the people of Valuthoor.

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Bored of her daily labour of rolling Bidis that she has been conscripted to contribute to her family’s income, Thangam loiters around the village with her friends, swimming in the river and climbing trees. Towards the end of the film, we see thick quotations revealing Pillai’s own cinephilia as a fitting end to the boldest of excursions that has Thangam crossing the Tamira Bharani river to head off to the nearby town Ambasamudram. The sequence recording sights of town life ends with a movie watching at the august Krishna Theatre with a screening of Oli Vilakku (1968, the remake of Phool Aur Patthar, 1966) starring MGR and Jayalalitha. Additionally, Thangam’s attachment to radio broadcast of film songs cites the music of Ilayaraja (the song ‘Senthalam Poove’ from Mullum Malarum, 1978) and watching a television screening of the song ‘Chinna Chinna Aasai’ from Roja (1992); a monologue of the film star Sivaji Ganesan additionally details the sound design (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2 Production still from Thangam (Courtesy Swarnavel Pillai)

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The first audiences for the finished film in the summer of 1995 were invitees from an Indian film festival in Rome: Ray’s celebrated cinematographer Subrata Mitra and directors Govind Nihalani and Ketan Mehta. Pillai remembers nervously watching Mitra’s reaction to rough-hewn scenes shot with available fluorescent lights in a tea shop; the recalcitrant Mitra’s reaction was a gentle touch on the wrist. Mehta, also an FTII alumni, noted the influence of Jean Rouch’s ethnography in some of the sequences that the lighter camera delivered. Prior to its premiere in India, in January 1996, Thangam was screened at many film festivals and received favourable reviews in a period before the arrival of digital cameras.37 The point of its low-budget production and eloquence of editing was not missed. Not surprising, the narrative itself with its lightness of touch and mimicking the loitering of the protagonist blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction works that had it winning the award for the Best Documentary of 1995 from The Tamil Progressive Writers Association. In hindsight, Thangam anticipates the digital by exploring the affordability of low-end cameras for feature films, Hi-8 camera that was then set to the service of documentary works. In the economy of small budget films winning festival accolades, Rima Das’s films set in a village on the banks of the Brahmaputra river bear an uncanny resemblance to Pillai and Freccia’s film; the DIY aesthetics touted for both Village Rockstars (2017) and Bulbul Can Sing (2018) are not far from the Hi-8 experiments in Valuthoor. Pillai’s own career has swerved additionally in the direction of academic scholarship where his deep knowledge and interests in experiments with cinema technologies are evident in his Madras Studios and beyond.38 On the filmmaking end, he has joined the movement of small budget independent digital filmmaking with Kattumaram (2019). The various exploits with Thangam have assured him of the affordances of technology, including the passage to digital through Hi-8. As the undisputed centre of film production technologies, Chennai emerges as the hub of cutting-edge practices in this period before the absolute conversion to digital—before sensors were commonplace and analogue processing still in vogue for film prints—filmmakers were experimenting with an assortment of cameras. Kamal Hassan has used mini DV camera in Mumbai Express (2005) and Red camera was enthusiastically touted as a breakthrough camera technology.39 Fowzia Fathima, a cinematographer trained in analogue at FTII, found herself witnessing

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this transition—the myriad pathways embarked on before total digitization. Assisting PC Sriram in Alaipayuthey/Waves (2000) directed by the commercially successful Mani Ratnam, Fathima was privy to the scope of special effects in a modest budget film. Graduating to being the Director of Photography (DOP) on an all-female crew of Mitr, my friend (2002) directed by Revathi, opened an oblique view of the transforming mediascape that had the protagonist based in the Bay area striking up friendships on online chat rooms. Her assignments extended to shooting actor-director Parthiban’s Ivan (2002), an action-drama film that combined shooting elaborate fight sequences and distending duration in certain sections with non-linear editing in post-production studios. While cameras were being imported, Hollywood was also exploiting the availability of technically proficient special effects facilities at Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad, with close ties to Chennai-based film production houses. A large-scale adventure drama, In the Shadow of the Cobra (2004), shot by Fathima availed of the state-of-the-art special effects technology at Ramoji. The film was canned, but Fathima recalls learning firsthand the ropes of managing a large-scale set (Fig. 1.3). Her rigorous training in 35mm cameras and willingness to work with different scales of production was the word around the industry, which is how she landed the assignment to shoot Mudhal Mudhal Mudhal Varai/M3V (2009) for Krishnan Seshadri Gomatam, a former assistant of Mani Ratnam and PC Sriram’s. A quirky story about the time pressures of making a first film, M3V had a commendable festival run, including being in the line-up of the 33rd Cairo International Film Festival’s programming section, Feature Digital Film, although it integrated both analogue and digital technologies in production.40 According to Fathima, the breaking point on production costs was the deployment of HDV for shooting fiction films. Initially adopted by documentary filmmakers who were enjoying HDV’s lightweight body and the attendant bargain costs of processing, in contrast to 16mm, the camera’s affordances and budget expenditure turned out to be precisely what aspiring filmmakers were looking for. All previously established schedules of a film shoot were beaten when Fathima was approached by Aathiraj to shoot his first feature film Silandhi/ Spider (2008) on HDV. The film was shot over a period of eleven days with two schedules—seven and four days—and Fathima supervised a print with Qube Cinema Technologies for Chennai theatres; the first complete Tamil language digital film to obtain a censor certificate. This ‘B grade’ genre film, Fathima recalls

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Fig. 1.3 Fowzia Fathima on the set of In the Shadow of the Cobra (Courtesy Fowzia Fathima)

ran for forty days—an unquestionable hit that had the producers striking a film print for theatres outside Chennai; further demands encouraged dubbed versions to circulate in Telegu and Malayalam language markets. Word of her on-the-run filmmaking and Fathima’s role in creating a commercial success reached V.K. Prakash who had made nine films that had won national awards, but none commercially viable. Fathima agreed to shoot his Gulumaal: The Escape (2009) with two HDV cameras, a low-cost production set up that sent a ripple of nervousness through the Malayalam film industry with visits to the set by established actors. Gulumaal turned out to be a hit and Fowzia Fathima was at the forefront of the conversion to digital filmmaking. The culmination of her experiments with digital cameras reached a pinnacle during her three-year teaching contract at Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) in 2010. As digital cameras were getting standardized and theatres were converting permanently to digital projection, the Producers Guild of America (PGA) was doing a world tour to

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promote various cameras, including a layover in Mumbai in 2011. As a government institution, SRFTI wanted to take a studied approach to conversion since the speed of obsolescence matched the costs of high-end cameras, and the pedagogy for training the next generation of cinematographers had to accommodate constantly changing affordances. Fathima’s prior experience with an array of cameras proved an advantage when choosing Arri’s Alexa for SRFTI for an exorbitant amount of 2.5 crore rupees; Arri’s assurance of a hundred years of longevity on the format was the winning detail of the sale. We shall return to Fowzia Fathima’s role in the formation of the Indian Women Cinematographers’ Collective (IWCC) in Chapter 8, ‘Time Out.’ Rather than considering the finished product and its postures in varied directions—art cinema, festival film, etc.—the attention to the process of filmmaking was equally an aesthetic, a practice, that filmmakers trained at film schools have embraced. From cinematographer Piyush Shah’s accounts and the curriculum of FTII, narrating the production process was not anathema and available on hand when prodded to recall (Fig. 1.4). As a chronicler and philosopher of this period and with a keen eye on the theorization of practices in the filmmaking cultures of India, Piyush Shah exalts the possibilities with the advent of digital cameras, a slew of films shot on low-end digital cameras, which he supports as the way of opening the gates to different kinds of films. Since India does not design or manufacture digital cameras, filmmakers tend to test a range of cameras before forming an attachment to one or another, which, in turn, issues ‘an extremely broad range of possibilities in the digital.’41 Since 2009 the most obvious trade names that circulate are Red, Arri Alexa, and Sony. Perhaps due to trade agreements, Shah notes that Panasonic at that moment did not enter the Indian film production on their own but through a partner, Zeiss and Cooke. Mid-range cameras including Blackmagic 4K, Red Scarlet, Arri Amira, and Sony F55 tend to be adopted by documentary filmmakers who often have to rely on Films Division and PSBT’s modest budgets of 7 lakh rupees, which can be stretched further since sound can be secured cheaply on a digital camera. A similar rationale governs the robust small budget regional films that are blossoming on account of the widely available cameras. At the bottom of the market is the digital single lens reflex (DSLR), a standard high definition (HD) camera that runs the risk of producing grainy images in contrast to the desired polished look of commercial films, feature films,

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Fig. 1.4 Piyush Shah on a set (Courtesy Piyush Shah)

and advertisements yet is adopted widely. While sensor recording cameras are ubiquitous, and filmmaking no longer the purview of trained professionals, Shah notes that the affordances of these cameras are yet to be fully exploited and the distinctiveness of the digital craft, which he emphasizes over the idea of technical expertise, is an ongoing process. All too often, cinematographers, even those who were not part of a generation migrating from analogue to digital, fall back on practices of set ups for shots that were honed in the era of 35mm film; the choice of digital camera turns out to be opportunistic rather than a consideration of its range of options. However, it does appear that at the bottom rung of cameras, the medium is far from settled, inspired by Dogma style as a forerunner on the easiness of a shoot (rough-hewn looks of minor cinemas such as Romanian and others). At the high end, however, an excess of shooting has been the norm for the last decade or so with the process of editing now weighing in extensively to shape the vast data. Given the gap in learning the possibilities (affordances), Shah hopes for a

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time when randomness will be embraced as the possibility of magic in this cinema. The challenges of the digital from the point of view of film are different, given the obsession over light exposures of fifty points with a range of 25–30 that now increases to sixty percent in exposure and forty percent in post. The bigger the production, the larger the demand for huge data backup that these high-end cameras deliver with ratios of 1:3 and 1:4. At the high end, cameras that can record vast details and their accessories command rich possibilities that celluloid could only imagine and can now be realized with data sensitive sensors. Shah lists Red, Arri, and Sony as the most proficient manufacturers for their sensors’ capabilities. The story of Red (now acquired by Sony) is rather ironic since it offers too many options for the filmmakers, ‘too much freedom (…) and assumes that cinematographers would be digital literate’ muses Shah. As trust and facility with digital cinematography fortified, processing labs were shuttered between 2009 and 2011 (I saw the last one in 2011 with full baths). In their place there has been a steady reckoning that with digital cinematography prevailing, there is little market for chemical processing laboratories. But a blanket move towards processing demands acknowledging the existence of computer chips and that cinematography is now a computational issue. Here, Shah cautions, processing speed doubles every eighteen months and the calculus is that five years down it will grow exponentially. Despite the prevalence of digital cameras, the set up of shoots is still based on film culture conventions: lighting and crew have not changed much. However, Shah notes that there is greater turbulence on the shape of the assemblage on lower-end productions, and at the high end, an excessive amount of shooting. In an odd twist to lighter cameras that are touted as a distinct feature of digital cameras, adding lenses and other accessories can more often than not entail a bulky camera assemblage. Only a cinematographer with a history of practice from analogue will acknowledge that the digital camera with lenses attached are often bricks and rarely ergonomic! Training and teaching of digital cinematography are still in their infancy, claims Shah. While the two major film schools, FTII and Satyajit Ray Film Institute of India (SRFTI), have gradually switched over to a complete and total curriculum based on digital, the newest statesponsored film school in Kerala takes pride in offering a complete commitment to digital. Teaching computational attributes dealing with high-end software and hardware systems has demanded a steady move

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from lessons in lighting to collaborations with engineers. ‘Cinematographers have also become colourists’ declares Piyush Shah referring to the extant practices of reading data on-screen that is distinctive with each camera and far from standardized across the range available. ‘Laptops create looks which can be attributed to Canon 5D DSLR democracy.’ He mentions an FTII film directed by Aadish Keluskar’s Kaul—A Calling (2016) as an early example of such a practice. Expressions of preference and difference between film and digital persists as a discussion among cinematographers who moved to digital after years of shooting on 16mm and 35mm. According to Ranjan Palit, ‘Digital has more latitude, 15-stops over 13-stops.’ However, many cinematographers attached to film qua film, he adds, will say that ‘when film “burns” with overexposure, it looks better.’ In contrast, digital ‘sees much more’ in darker areas. To get darker images, to shoot darker, and yet obtain detail of textures, Palit refers to how Alexa will use half as much light; he shot Aparajita Tumi (2012), sixteen kilowatts of lights, impossible on film and seventy percent of the film was set in interior locations, the rest in the photogenic light of northern California. As the first film that was shot completely on Alexa, fellow cinematographers were visiting Palit’s while supervising colour grading (the older term persists, Digital Intermediate) with colourist Ashirwad Hadkar at the Prime Focus Lab, Mumbai. At one such session with cinematographers K.U. Mohanan—taking a break from shooting advertisements and finishing post-production work for Miss Lovely—and Setu who was shooting Kahaani (2012), I was privy to their collective focus on the work-in-progress on-screen. It was a long scene towards the end of the film with the couple. The tracking shots framed them towards the window behind a bed that opened to a garden flooded with bright sunshine, casting attractive shadows on their faces and brown skins. Mohanan asked Palit about what fill lights he had used to match, perhaps satin or Thermacol, to mitigate the light flooding in. When Palit admitted to using nothing other than the camera and natural light, Mohanan’s quiet statement said it all: ‘This is better than film.’ There was no doubt that in film, the outdoors would have been overexposed and gradations of shadows on the actors non-existent; here one could achieve a balance of highlights. Palit ends the discussion, noting that the storage of data on digital sensors developed rapidly, moving from 2K resolution in 2011 to 4K within the span of two years. With the capacity to offer a wider palette of darkness, balance highlights, and sculpt shadows, digital cameras seem to have won

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over cinematographers whose penchant for expressionist-style lighting in celluloid seems to have found a wider girth with digital sensors. From the floors of shooting for Netflix in India, I have been hearing there is a move to finish film grading on HDR (High dynamic range imaging) and streaming films on HDR screens; writing on high-end digital technologies always belated. At the same time, there is a hierarchy in camera sensors among low-end cameras that offer all kinds of advantages, yet they do arrive with some drawbacks with the colour palette that even the best-trained filmmakers cannot overcome. For instance, FTII-trained, Indranil Roychowdhury’s debut film Phoring/ Dragonfly (2013) follows the delightful adventures of a child protagonist who lives in rural Bengal. I watched the film as an MP4 file, which was flush with oversaturated green. Roychowdhury had been awarded the prestigious Prasad Labs award for post-production, nevertheless colour correction was still being standardized in 2012, and as he narrated to me, the sensors of low-end cameras were not finely calibrated to mitigate such saturation. This hardly dimmed the film’s successful festival circulation, in fact its low-budget played as an advantage. Some of these ‘mishaps’ surface when students shoot in log mode, when they underexpose, there is little left in data stored to work with in post-production. The ongoing discoveries in the digital demand a culture of sharing expertise and equipment; legendary cinematographer Binod Pradhan, for example, has a rental business that deals extensively with lens that can be added as accessories. ‘In the digital world we write film’ declares Piyush Shah with an obvious nod to written codes embedded in the sensors and the ongoing process of writing that happens in post-production with the shoot downloaded as digital acquisition from memory cards. The irony appears in that the French word for cinematography translates as ‘writing light,’ which the Anglo world has put paid to in the age of the digital! Computergenerated imagery (CGI) effects, for instance written codes, have added codes to convey depth and achieve the effect of naturalism. Yet, Pixar films, for example, render codes that no human eye can see, and untold levels of depth draw us into worlds unseen on-screen before. Given the easy reach of this technology, Shah reminds me that structured cinema is dead—a working style that had reached its apotheosis in art house works with story boards for every shot imagined; the chapter on Amitabh Chakraborty’s cinema will return to this question of structured cinema and digital contingency. To push the possibilities of unstructured cinema,

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Shah hazards either a deeply personal cinema or its extreme opposite, a mega thriller that is audience centred with a range of interactive possibilities. I return to these possibilities by looking at the rise of single crew films as a sharp instance of ‘personal films’ including Piyush Shah’s Third Infinity (2018) in subsequent chapters. Before we dive into production, it is worth remembering that projection in theatres was the first to opt for the digital route. Initially, sound arrived separately on a disk (5.1 Digital Theatre Systems Inc. [DTS]) and had to be interlocked with SMTP (The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) time coding. Then came prism projection and finally Digital Cinema Package (DCP) has emerged as the standard format for projection. In the transition period, there were digital prints based on ‘reverse telecine’ in 1995 and transferred to digital in 1997–1998, as was the case with Divya Drishti (2002). These were standard definition films that had been subjected to a digital intermediary process to embed correction codes. Given the large number of single screen theatres with bracket projectors that still proliferate across India, Shah has seen a quick reduction of filmlike digital prints for commercial films that were initially fifty to seventy films to around to five to ten prints. However, given the quality of screens per se, that all too often suffer years of neglect and accumulate dirt, the projected print often has dull contrasting despite the time expended in correction sessions. This was the fate of Aparajito Tumi (2012), the first film shot completely on Alexa by Ranjan Palit and that is held up by the colourist Ashirwad Hadkar at Prime Focus Lab as the gold standard for achieving a range of hues of darkness. At its screening at the single screen Priya Theatre, Kolkata, the projected print is a sea of darkness, the range rendered null. The dull, yet oft repeated rationale, is that because projection lights were deemed too expensive to replace regularly, cinematographers would have to adjust their shooting process by brightening light set ups that would lean towards glossy overlit looks or flat lighting. Local projection conditions have to be considered a factor despite the global circulation of cameras, adds Shah, a sentiment echoed by other cinematographers as well. Far from being standardized, digital projection in India has had not only to adjust to the varying arrangement of throws of projection in different theatres, and further, to mitigate electricity failures with backup generators to smoothen fluctuations. In addition to the mishaps governing the analogue era, projectionists now have to adjust throws so that 40 lux RGB has to be measured for Screen H2H to arrive at the correct luminescence.

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We are back to the problem of rationing that projectionists have long practised by burning less carbon so as to lengthen the life of the bulb, muses Shah, at the long experience of watching films in theatres.42 Shah reminds me that often the best digital delivery for digital cinematography is a digital television! This end story has a longer history in the shooting of films and its distribution to theatres and then to television, before the era of digital streaming. There are two categories of filmmakers says Shah: those who believe in one medium alone—the supremacy of celluloid. Then there are other filmmakers who will work in any format and across formats so as to question the difference between ‘making image’ and ‘making cinema.’ A definitive factor that sticks and resurfaces in my discussions with filmmakers over the years was the prohibitive costs of celluloid before liberalization, and surely after when cinematographers were forced to move over to digital even if they were hesitant given their earlier training and practice in a different medium. This is where we can glean how the place of television finds an early iteration in Shah’s own practice in shooting Mani Kaul’s Siddheshwari (1990) that was literally a narrative between formats. Kaul had undertaken a biopic on the Hindustani music singer Siddheswari, incorporating re-dramatization with the actress Mita Vashisht, and drawing on a large corpus of discovered footage that turned out to be her live performances broadcast on national television, Doordarshan. As the cinematographer, Shah was playing with aspect ratios from the beginning and, as he recalled incorrect projections have been experienced by Indian filmmakers in years past. Television broadcast of 4 × 3 would result in considerable distortion, pan-scanning, that the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), the government-funding agency, would barely acknowledge while striding ahead in their mandate to broadcast all their funded films, often carefully calibrated by meticulous cinematographers such as Piyush Shah. As if to return the favour, Siddheshwari pays great homage to televisual broadcasts by attending to both scan lines in some sections, and yet in others, doctoring them with special effects to mimic 4 × 3 ratios. The preservation of Siddheshwari precipitated the question of formats in the digital age, a narrative richly conveyed by Ashish Rajadhyaksha in his account of his curatorial process at the Fourth Guangzhou Triennial (2012) where he brought the late Mani Kaul’s cinema works into the gallery space and placed them alongside Ranbir Kaleka’s digital video works.43 This was a posthumous resurrection of Kaul’s work and Shah

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was the sole author of this version.44 The DVD version that was a standin for circulation, clearly was not worth working from, but Shah was constrained by ‘a dreadfully degraded source: the digi-beta, now cramped in the telecine transfer into the restricted TV space that digi-beta had been created for. It was like working on a torn piece of silk: very time one started to stitch up one tear, something else would tear.’ Looking back upon his restoration work, Shah would be full of self-doubt: ‘We should perhaps never have done this,’ he said later.45 Broadcast television has its own digital story.46 Since the arrival of 16 × 9 television sets, 4 × 3 films are broadcast in letterbox format that improves on maintaining the fidelity as far as possible. With the introduction of High Dynamic Range (HDR) technology in television sets that we know from watching Amazon and Netflix globally, we can see, Shah reminds me, an extended luminous curve that encompasses wider colours. He adds that the limits of these possibilities are yet to arrive. Although HDR had only a small market share as television sets, they are slowly arriving in theatres as Dolby HDR in sound, one in Mumbai and another in Delhi. However, Shah notes after seeing screenings in both of these venues, the carbon arcs were weak, the projectionists were recapitulating to power saving methods that they were accustomed to doing while projecting celluloid prints! Whereas at home, you can optimize the HDR metadata conveys on this display system. Hence, Over-thetop media service (OTT) streaming on Amazon and Netflix is superior to theatre. In the years ahead, Shah sees the process of digital acquisition improving compared to what it was ten years ago, for instance, the possibility of 8K theatrical broadcast in Japan. Piyush Shah’s philosophizing of the dispositif based on his longstanding practice offers a curatorial brief that I wish to deploy to a line-up of films that explicitly or implicitly engage with various formats in their narrative in the transition period that ends with digital technology from start to finish. Keeping with the project at hand to recognize works that deserve a second look, I list Hansal Mehta’s Dil Par Mat Le Yaar (2000), a neo-noir that follows the doomed exploits of a wedding videographer, and The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project (2010), a self-reflexive project shot on HDV, and allegedly India’s first Mumble Core film, as low-budget aesthetics. Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhoka/Love, Sex, and Betrayal (2011) set in the National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi deploys close-circuit surveillance footage as the conduit for three entangled narratives that move between amateur filmmaking and sensational

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reporting, largely set in a convenience store. The film was widely advertised for its look, enveloping a range of digital formats that produced a rough-hewn appearance that worked as the film’s own mise en abyme.47 For films overtly engaged with television with an emphasis on cinematicity, I place Siddheshwari next to Suma Josson’s Janmadinam (1997/1998) that follows a television reporter’s long night in her own delivery room. In one eerie moment, a sequence blown up with slow motion effects, the protagonist flees through a garden with televisions on pedestals, reminiscent of video art installations that owe their origins to the artist Nam June Paik’s oeuvre, reminding us of the moving image as an expanded concept before the advent of the digital. Cable television in the age of satellite communication not only appears in the mise en scène of the film, but as an index of dating the narrative. For instance, in Ramgopal Varma’s Bhoot /Ghost (2003) the couple make love while the television in the room broadcasts a news commentary on the Godhra massacre of February 2002, an attribution of horror to the erotics on display. In another direction, and over a decade later, Mahesh Narayanan’s debut Malayalam film Take Off (2017) uses the archive of Al Jazeera broadcasts as found footage to embellish the mise en scène of Tirkit, Iraq, as the setting for a narrative about being marooned during the American war in Iraq narrated from the point of view of a family from Kerala. While Dubai doubled as Iraq in most parts, scenes of war and captivity were constructed by animating Al Jazeera’s digital signals in the special effects studios of Ramoji Rao Film City, Hyderabad. Ship of Theseus (2012) is an example of a ‘laptop film’ whose own proclivity towards philosophical subjects adopts the modular structure of an anthology film of the kind that television has adopted, the format that jumpstarted Anand Gandhi’s career. The place of television has a prominent role in Tamil cinema and receives a longer treatment in Chapter 5, ‘Tamil New Wave.’

FTII: Transition from Analogue to Digital From Piyush Shah’s insights on the transition from analogue to digital technologies, I want to turn to the cinematographer Ravi Kiran Ayyagari’s account of how this shift revised the curriculum and transformed subsequent practices of FTII students at one of India’s two national film schools.48 Ayyagari echoes the sentiments of many of the graduates that while digital cameras were widely available for amateurs to embrace cinematography, there is a discernible difference between trained and untrained cinematographers when confronting the mechanics of the

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camera. There is good reason for this stance given the rigour of the curriculum. When Ayyagari entered FTII in 2006, the basic structure of the select class of cinematographers, with limits set to no more than twelve students each year, commenced their camera module with a 35mm black and white film with (Kodak 100 and 200ASA) with a Pentax K1000 still camera.49 Exercises included shoots and the film was processed the next morning. Once students understood how negatives behaved, they would graduate to Camera R1 and tell a story first in three shots and then in six shots. For these direction classes, lower-grade Sony DVCAM DSR- PD 100 was the curriculum. By the end of the first year, students mastered two major classes: 400 feet of a one continuity exercise on 16mm film. More often than not, actual short narrative films emerged! The final exercise was on Sony DSR PD170, a tape-based camcorder system. Ayyagari reminisces that when he recently found his own images shot on PD170: ‘they looked so organic, so analogue-like’ (Fig. 1.5). While DV tape was inexpensive, PD 170 could only be reserved for four days at a time, a time constraint that had students shoot at night and wrap up in three to four days. Collectively, the students would prepare in groups, and each student made his or her own film. The scriptures and

Fig. 1.5 Still from Student Film shot on a PD 170 (Courtesy Ravikiran Ayyagari)

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culture pushed the curriculum away from big productions and confined location shoots no further than the designated city limits of Pune. Since they did not rely on elaborate lighting gear, they often worked with available bulbs or the ones picked up from daily use. This pared-down shooting kit turned out to be a good lesson for Ayyagari’s feature film Lajwanti (2014) directed by his classmate Pushpendra Singh, where they relied extensively on camp fires to illuminate night scenes. A local musician suggested the latter’s wife cover the bulb with her duppata (scarf) to soften the light, which would have the desired effect to enlarge shadows and increase textures. Second-year training in cinematography was commandeered by K.G. Soman whose writings on the theory and practice of cinematography appear regularly in the journal Lensight: A Technical Journal for the Celluloid and Electronic Media Professionals .50 The semester length term was designed with theory classes in the morning followed by practicals in the afternoon. Each student was allotted 2,000 feet each of black and white and colour (Fuji or Kodak film stock were the customary options) in the second and third year. A potlatch was well on its way if a student did not use the allotted 4,000 feet and offered it to a classmate who had a tendency towards a higher shooting ratio. For instance, in his third year, Ayyagari was able to compensate a shortfall by drawing from his classmate Avinash Arun’s allotment. A pedagogical commitment towards apprenticeship enters as early as the second year when they are assigned to assist their senior batches with cinematography or the reverse: Ayyagari was in his third year when he collaborated with Ruchir Arun, a secondyear direction student, to create a film from the footage saved from other class assignments (practicals), an extracurricular attempt. The routine, of course, was to collaborate with their batch mates: shoot second directing students’ exercises and year-end films. As students of cinematography, they were constantly learning and experimenting with the possibilities of the camera: how to handle shutter changes and how to push film stock. The camera of choice designated during this period (2007–09) was Arriflex 35 IIC (Arriflex 35 was a war camera manufactured in 1937 to mount on fighter aircraft for aerial photography), the established industry standard since the 1970s and 1980s, which was a clear indication of the preferred destination for FTII cinematographers. Assigned exercises included a studio-based shot, a mise en scène exercise on black and white stock. In the middle of their second year, they switched to working with

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colour stock and thereafter had to master the use of colour contrasts (Fig. 1.6). In addition to Soman’s classes, master workshops with alumni who had joined the industry were de rigeur. The list of workshops that Ayyagari recalls includes Kiran Deohans’ session, whose first film was Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (1988) and followed by a slew of Bollywood films—Aks (2001), Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gam (2001), Jodhaa Akbar (2008) to name a few—before settling into a career shooting advertisements. Deohans’ modules for the master class conducted in FTII’s largest studio, Studio 1, included jewellery shoots and in a radically different direction, a second lesson on how to mount a rural scene. The lesson was not how to be realistic, but to learn to ‘mock reality.’ The second workshop was conducted by Anil Mehta, whose move to large budget Hindi cinema was permanent with the success of Lagaan (2001). It was a treat, according to Ayyagari, to hear of practices at play

Fig. 1.6 Ravikiran Ayyagari, second-year cinematography exercise in 2008 with a ARRI 35 2C (Courtesy Ravikiran Ayyagari)

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on the set of a large budget film that included instructions on how to handle gaffers, order a set of lights, and lay electrical earthing in outdoor shoots—a crucial lesson that was drilled into students to know that if not rigged properly, fatal electrocutions were not ruled out on outdoor shoots. The third workshop was conducted by K.U. Mohanan who had by then not only worked with Mani Kaul and shot independent documentaries, but was fresh from the success of a commercial film, Don (2006), shot with Kodak film stock. His practice offered a different approach: how to embrace natural lighting, create depth in open spaces, and mould negative filling. Ayyagari remembers a crucial tip that Mohanan shared with them that only practice offers in times of desperation: black drapes simulate depth. For their documentary class, a section of the curriculum in the second year, Ranjan Palit was invited to conduct a workshop. Palit had by then established a reputation as a cinematographer who had provided the visual style for the independent documentary films of the 1980s onwards: Anand Patwardhan’s Bombay: Our City (1985), Reena Mohan’s Kamlabai (1992), Ruchir Joshi’s Egaro Mile (1991) and Tales from Planet Kolkata (1993), Sanjay Kak’s In the Forest Hangs a Bridge (1999), and his own Voices from Baliapal (1988), to name a few. In sharp contrast to previous master classes, the focus here was to dispense with bulky industry standard cameras and plunge into embracing handheld devices by exploring the dynamics of a camcorder, and to consider the possibilities of video aesthetics, a format that documentary filmmakers had adopted given the advantages of both cost and convenience. Ayyagari was particularly invested in Palit’s visit, having chosen to write his proposed written thesis on this cinematographer’s practice based on his signature handheld practice; he would subsequently assist Palit on several projects for five years.51 Other visiting cinematographers, who appeared later in their third year, included C.K. Muralidharan, Venu, and Hemant Chaturvedi, all fresh from a range of successful commercial projects. Most memorable of classes, according to Ayyagari, was Barun Mukherjee’s visit, (an alumnus of 1969 who now runs a rental shop), who taught them how to shoot song picturizations and the only one of the seasoned cinematographers who actively teamed up with students behind the camera. These workshops were planned to afford access to better cameras, Arriflex 535B, Arriflex 535A, and if needed, video tape was at their disposal as well. Kodak and Fuji routinely sponsored second- and third-year workshops and students would reap two or three cans of 400 feet of film that they

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would hoard towards their own projects; Ayyagari admits that the camera department was spoiled for riches. ‘Digital was slowly creeping in’ Ayyagari recalls naming the recourse to telecine for scanning negatives, the process that eventually set forth the slow demise of processing laboratories. Another distinct moment was when his batch was invited by Fujifilm in Mumbai to watch and learn colour correction on a digital platform at the post-production facility, Prime Focus, in Khar. On another occasion, they attended a workshop convened by Arri to inaugurate their Arriflex D20 model at Whistling Woods (a film school on the grounds of Film City, the government land allotted to the film industry; this large acreage was nothing short of a land grab from the nomadic tribes, Adivasis, who have long lived in these parts) and before they knew it, D21 was issued in the Indian market and Alexa Classic followed close on its heels in 2010. Despite the market turning towards digital, the students were hell bent on persisting to shoot on celluloid. Initial responses to these highly trained students was that digital cameras are pretty complicated and strange. ‘What I see is what is recorded’ was a cryptic response recalls Ayyagari, with none of the accident or happenstance of celluloid processing that they were taught adds value to the shaping of image. In addition, the settings on a digital camera were preset and any changes or mishaps would entail sending it back to the factory of origin for a reset, the land of secretly guarded digital codes. Ayyagari’s Diploma Film, Jaane Kya Tune Kahi (2011) directed by his classmate Nisha Ramakrishnan, bears the mark of the transition era. The project was conceived to be borne as an optical print that involved processing the negative at Fuji Film Lab, Goregaon. After that initial processing, editing per se was accomplished through telecine at FTII and arranging the sequences by using Avid’s non-linear editing programme, Media Composer, which had been used by editors since 1995–96 and a distinct intimation of the first phase of digital in filmmaking. On his own initiative, Ayyagari scanned the output onto a 2K digital file and supervised colour grading (colour correction) at the Digital Intermediary (DI) facilities at Pixion, now a shuttered digital post-production laboratory in Mumbai; Pixion extended gratis to film school cinematographers, a best practices lure that had cinematographers returning to these very facilities once they had embarked on their professional careers. The digital image was printed on intermediary negative stock, Fuji RDI stock, subsequently printed on a Kodak print stock Vision3 2393 (every stock

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has a number, product number) since final projection was then still film in 2011; FTII did not convert to digital projection in the Main Theater till 2015. He insists that the actual nuts and bolts of technology are not what add up to filmmaking training at FTII, but the collective commitment to ‘making image.’ Working towards this commitment may result in a delayed maturation of practice and not one that is realized immediately during the years at FTII in the form of a student Diploma film. It is in this spirit, of belatedness that Ayyagari chooses his long feature film Lajwanti (2014) shot on a Canon 5D Mark 2, a DSLR camera, well after graduating from FTII as his Diploma film. A decade into professional assignments, Ayyagari notes how since protocols of DI have been fortified, cinematographers do not need to check on every instance of grading; ‘the colourist sends a screen grab and you check it on your smart phone,’ for instance, when commissioned to work on advertisements. Yet, he adds, you simply cannot pull off checking screen grabs for a feature film since the variations of adjustments on the rendered data are greater. Despite the inevitable march towards digital, Ayyagari has also been experimenting with analogue options on smaller projects, often gallery installation works, which allow him to hone his own practice as a still photographer. ‘Digital sensors are too sharp,’ he bemoans. All of his reservations about digital cinematography played to his strengths when teaming up with director Pushpendra Singh for the second feature film, Ashwatthama (2017). Before the film was even shaped, Ayyagari spent a month in Chambal, January 2016, a year before beginning principal photography. Although he initially conceived shooting on 35mm black and white film, Singh and he settled on digital acquisition since they reckoned the costs of retakes with a cast of untrained actors would be astronomically high on film. Despite the romance of the analogue, they finally settled on a digital option with additions. To achieve optical quality of the lenses, he used Zeiss High speed Mark 3 and after consulting with Bipan Chandra Naria, his former professor’s expertise with optics is legendary, settled on a second-hand vintage lens procured by the vendor during a trip to Poland in 1997. Ayyagari spotted one at a lens rental store in Mumbai. (Vintage lenses most in demand are Panavision and Hawk. Panavision are cinematographer friendly, and in India, they actively seek out cinematographers to use their cameras.) The reason to actively deploy vintage lens, according to Ayyagari, was to inject a high degree of analogue-era allure since the

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coating on lenses for handling high light is unpredictable, gradations are different, and the decay contributes to a certain concept for a film such as Ashwatthama (2017) that is deliberately vague about its own time period. Before testing their shooting gear, they assembled a camera with a body from a Delhi rental unit and lens from Mumbai. They had tested cameras but had not yet paired lens with the camera. Of course, adjustments were in order since one 18mm was slightly off, 35mm focus ring was so tight that the whole camera would move when executing a crane shot. They had to redo the ensemble to steady the head of the camera that was on the tripod but the lens attached to it had an issue with the threading of a screw that had to be jerry-rigged (‘jugaad’) to work with the steadiness of the tripod when atop a crane. On the first day shot, there was a slight problem with the 18mm lens that was still a ‘bit off,’ but was set as the visual look for the film. ‘I like aberrations. I like imperfections… Feels like an art work,’ confesses Ayyagari. Ashwatthama’s black and white look was further honed by creating three black and white LUTS (Look Up Table) with an independent colourist/cinematographer—Srikant from Mumbai, who was later recruited as the grading consultant for the film—who devised the basic contrast, a look that was also clear, faded, and high contrast. Ayyagari used a Y filter, a yellowish hue, to boost the camera’s capacity to record movements through dense fog; and to cut the blue wavelength in the visual spectrum. The footage was further enhanced during grading so as to come as close as possible to double X negative, Kodak 5222 black and white 200 ASA film. After the first night’s shoot, he sent the footage to his colourist to check if the exposure had been calibrated correctly or not. ‘When I saw the raw file, I realized I could push, go darker, but the colourist suggested not to go beyond 1600 ASA. If I pushed the sensors beyond 1600, I would be increasing digital noise and you lose the details of the shadows…I added “film grain” on digital image, separately on highlights, mid tones and shadows to achieve a graininess close to 35mm black and white film.’ Pushpendra Singh wanted a look of timelessnes akin to Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and the winter fog and haze in Chambal Valley recreated the ‘Adbhut rasa: wonder and curiosity…astonishment and achieved a mystical flavour’ (Fig. 1.7). Such discussions on imported technologies invariably lead to how adjustments have to be made in response to working conditions in India, particularly the play of elements. It goes without emphasis that a certain levelling has happened with the advent of digital, ‘we are on

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Fig. 1.7 Still from Ashwatthama (Courtesy Pushpendra Singh)

a par globally.’ For instance, the Technological Broadcast India Fair in India occurs at the end of October and the cameras from this fair, first arrive in Chennai before they make their way to Mumbai and Hyderabad, a clear hierarchy of technical expertise that Prasad Studios and Labs have commanded in Chennai. Despite these annual updates that point to ongoing obsolescence, vintage lenses have been making a resurgence. Anand Cine is the main retailer for a range of lost lenses salvaged with untold foresight when theatres were dismantling their projectors, labs were discarding their baths, and editing suites junking their tables. Additionally, the labour-intensive aspect of Indian film shoots shows little signs of abating says Ayyagari. ‘If we ask for five light attendant personnel, I would get six, whereas in the U.S. you can work with two.’ Additionally, companies have had to respond to tropical conditions of working, Alexa has a tropical mode, it has to function in monsoon conditions: ‘Arri is very forgiving, it can take the battering of a shoot, even when shooting in rains.’ For instance, he tells me that Anil Mehta prefers to use the bulky SONY F65 with 16-bit Raw; Ranjan Palit uses Sony Venice because he can mitigate digital noise, and Ayyagari prefers the Arri Alexa Mini for its ergonomic body and it works well for him when matched for a softer look with Cooke Lens s4i for ‘romantic looks’ and Modern Zeiss for sharper compositions. The question of an unwieldy ensemble

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echoes Piyush Shah’s sentiments as well on the addition of accessories on a digital camera. Ayyagari cites the Sony F65, as an ideal studio camera that can shoot in any condition, but is very bulky. When you wander onto a set, you can see the array of accessories that are added to the camera: remote focus unit (in lieu of a focus puller), wireless feed system, onboard monitor in addition to the view finder. As Ayyagari reminds me, when a camera is on a remote crane, the added weight on the camera results in unintended teetering effects. In these continuing efforts towards a lighter contraption, in a current Netflix series, Ayyagari is experimenting with carbon fibre-based additions. The direction he is leaning towards, an experiment in practice, he reminds me, also inflected Roger Deakin’s choice of Arri Alexa Mini LF (large format) with its avowed advantage of large format sensors for shooting 1917 (2019). As we close our discussion, we veer towards the persistence of analogue film cultures that results in sub-par VFX for Indian films, while these very post-production houses service global cinema including the special effects for Spiderman that were accomplished in India. With analogue shuttering at many levels, we end with a list of landmarks that deserve to be mentioned: the last film on 35mm at FTII was in 2018 (Sridhar Kak’s Diploma Film). The analogue era had its share of world-class technicians in India. For instance, Ujjwal Nirgudkar at Filmcenter Laboratory in Tardeo, holds the global patent for ‘Grey Scale.’52 ‘Film Labs had ace colour graders who are the unacknowledged artists,’ Ayyagari continues. Ravichandran, for instance, was a maestro with colour, and won National Film Awards for two films. Yet, when he came to FTII in 2011 to teach colour grading, he could not convey those lessons to the digital format; a casualty of moving from chemical processing to colour grading. Ayyagari’s own affection for vintage lens is ‘to kill the digital look’ despite the increasing costs that seem to accrue quietly during rentals. Among filmmakers who have been outfitting digital cameras with analogue lens, he singles out Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Love’s Labour (2014) and Jonaki (2018) as films that resorted to adding 1990s lens as well as Arun Karthick for using Zeiss super speed Mark 3 optics for his film Nasir (2020). Up close, he recalls director Ram Reddy’s research for Thithi (2015) to which he was privy during a three-week shooting stint. Reddy was bent on shooting on a digital 16mm camera, a Ikonoscope Acam D II, (a boutique camera), that was matched with a Cooke vintage zoom lens of 10–30mm focal length with f 1.5 aperture for 16mm. To my query on these experiments with analogue lenses when digital effects

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can easily mimic celluloid, Ayyagari betrays his film school training to philosophize: ‘there is randomness in the image. And when projected, the flicker allows the eyes to rest. Digital doesn’t give you a rest. Fatigue from watching.’53

Pad.ma From rank newcomers to seasoned scholars of Indian cinema studies, online film searches will lead one sooner or later to the web platform www.pad.ma. Subscribed to by libraries, the site, once you log in, offers a purview of a digital archive—Public Access Digital Archive—that adopted the domain name as www.pad.ma. Designed and now managed by the art group CAMP, the site displays a thick network of digital archiving as a form of art activism. While CAMP’s interventions will appear in my other book project on experimental art practices, and hence lies outside the purview of this book on feature films, I want to retell the beginnings of this digital project that was spurred on by the feminist public intellectual, theatre activist, documentary filmmaker and curator, Madhusree Dutta. This story has particular origins and as with all stories of collecting and archiving, lost trails and unexpected offerings (gifts) abound (Fig. 1.8).54 The year is 2002, and Madhusree Dutta’s film Made in India was commissioned by Manchester-based art outfit, City Art Galleries, as part of a large show on contemporary Indian art curated by the Indian artist Ghulammohammed Sheikh, ‘Home Street Shrine Bazaar Museum.’ While Sheikh’s keen curatorial gestures showcased the wide range of contemporary art and craft practices across India on an international stage, coinciding with a renaissance in the former industrial city of Manchester, U.K., the political theatre in India and in particular his state of residence, Gujarat, was wrecked with communal violence.55 Writings on Godhra have isolated the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s instrumentalizing of televisual footage of corpses to whip up sentiments of vengeance against Muslims in his state. To put it more pointedly, the Godhra event as it has come to be known turns out to be the new millennial’s first of many virulent pogroms against Muslims that approximates war crimes as deemed by the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Sheikh himself, according to Dutta, was a target of Hindu mobs and had gone into hiding. Reporters seeking to correct and respond to Modi’s commandeering of television broadcast were seeking to frame the unleashing of communal

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Fig. 1.8 Madhusree Dutta on a set during the years at Majlis (Courtesy Madhusree Dutta)

violence in the longue durée of such events, deploying television since the advent of the deregulation of channels after liberalization in 1991. Here, the search led many of them to the razing of Babri Masjid in 1992 that was broadcast live on the BBC, but banned on state-controlled channels in India.56 While still photographs of the Hindu right-wing foot soldiers, Kar Sevaks, demolishing brick by brick the seventeenthcentury mosque are available as newspaper photographs, moving image evidence has been carted off into the bowels of censored material. Whatever the political persuasion of coalition governments in India, televisual reportage of Kar Sevaks razing the mosque and the police standing by as onlookers has been deemed to have the power to incite violence— incendiary images in short. Nevertheless, a total cordoning off of the mediascape has not happened. Feature films have evoked the razing of Babri Masjid in different ways over the years. Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (1995) obliquely frames the television programming in the family home. From my interviews with Ratnam’s directorial team, I write of how these images were culled from Suma Josson’s documentary Bombay Blood Yatra

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(1993) that has on-the-ground reporting of rioting that spread through Mumbai during 1992–93.57 In Saeed Mirza’s Naseem (1995) the news of Babri Masjid being razed is part of the dialogue between young men, but the film excludes using them as visual quotations. It is the scant presence or lack of availability that had reporters seeking Madhusree Dutta’s I live in Behrampada (1993). Documenting the lives of predominantly Muslim residents ravaged by communal violence in Mumbai following the razing of Babri Masjid in Ayodhaya, the documentary film’s fuzzy images of that razing on a televisual screen, which subsequently found a second life as the much sought after visual quotation. Dutta narrates, realizing the paucity of found footage of crucial events, both on 16mm film and video that had her launch in a direction beyond Majlis’s commitment to feminist interventions in the law. ‘To start a public access archive was then a very political act,’ she says. Noting that it was a sharp turn from her earlier work with the women’s rights organization Majlis, this endeavour would challenge her own professional ethics of not accumulating and preferring to ‘live out of a suitcase.’ All of these presumptions of work and self would have to be put aside as she honed the idea of an archive in the move towards the digital. The digital means an endless and steady supply of electricity that keeps the machines on track; something that cannot be assumed in India. Rather, as the public knows, servers are expensive and continuous supply of electricity or battery generators as backups are at best temporary arrangements in the midst of power outages and load-shedding. Despite offshore software tasks globally that draw on large bodies of recruits from India to fulfil consumer services in western capitalist enclaves, the lives of these workers, as documented in the films Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005) and John and Jane (2005), are still part of a pre-digital, reluctant postcolonial global capitalism.58 It is in this context of digital lag and digital divide that I consider the import of Dutta’s insistence that the storage of this visual material had to be offline. For her, the lessons from analogue were still vibrant, particularly the tactile materiality of tapes that could never be replicated in the alleged immateriality of digital storage. In keeping with analogue culture, she set up a department within Majlis with a few hard disks, anticipating the digitization of visual material that would arrive from filmmakers. Resonating with the industrial culture of Mumbai with their reliance on warehouses, the department was called ‘Goddam’ accenting

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it for Marathi and Gujarati. Their call to filmmakers, especially documentary filmmakers, for their unedited rushes had a tepid response: most of the filmmakers declined, worried that their footage would be misused for purposes other than their intent. Nevertheless, they received a substantial amount from filmmaker Saeed Mirza who was commissioned by staterun Doordarshan to make a multi-part documentary on India’s fiftieth year, titled A Tryst with the People of India (1997). Mumbai-based documentary filmmaker Pankaj Rishi Kumar also brought in a bagful of tapes that matched Dutta’s own DV stash from shooting I live in Behrampada (1993). After a lull caused by the reluctance of filmmakers to donate, a momentum from progressive groups grew after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost the elections in 2004. The convening of the World Social Forum in that same year brought international activists to Mumbai, which had the effect of shooting surplus films. Young filmmakers were shooting in the world’s largest slum, Dharavi, that was under the threat of real estate speculation; footage arrived in Majlis, which had for a long time seen a link between the evacuation following on the heels of communal riots and the commandeering of these neighbourhoods by real estate speculators. Dutta’s own film 7 Islands and a Metro (2006) came from that space of observation and reflection. With the rapid turn to a deluge of material, Dutta and her colleagues realized Majlis had exceeded its capacity to catalogue, convert, and store the visual material that came pouring in at this juncture. Close at hand, with a fellowship from Majlis, were artists Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran whose art studio—CAMP—as mentioned above was an ideal partner to oversee this material, which was now heading decidedly towards the digital. As digital artists working with algorithms, CAMP took over Goddam’s initial storage and formed the Public Access Digital Archive, www.pad.ma. They collaborated with Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lütgert of Berlin-based collective, The Oil of the 21st Century, and the Alternative Law Forum, India, to deal with questions of data protection and piracy, and build a digital file sharing system that would aspire to Open Source protocols.59 www.pad.ma has morphed in many directions, including discussions on art practices in Afghanistan, but for my purposes here, suffice it to say that the forging with www.cine.ma offers a portal for Indian cinema studies scholars seeking footage and annotations on Indian cinema. With ties to

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Media Lab, Jadavpur, www.cine.ma has been uploading VHS transferred Indian films as the source material for a project on annotations.60 Rather than bemoan the constantly bargained condition of these films, I want to be alert to proclamations of the Berlin-based artist Hito Steyerl who has embraced ‘poor image’ as the currency for global alliances rather than a bad copy of neoliberal capitalism.61 In the manifesto-like prose, Steyerl resurrects ‘imperfect cinema,’ the rallying cry in ‘Toward a Third Cinema’ manifesto by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, as the residual term whose potency persists with digital filmmaking.62 I want to focus on how a scholar working in the archives of Indian cinemas has to reckon with, live with, and gloss over the materiality of films that now show up on various online sites. In the case of the book, every chapter has had to face a cult film whose reputation has been kept alive on contraband DVDs obtained from televisual broadcasting and compressed files from already obsolete digital recording devices. Acknowledging these material conditions inflecting research, enhances the visual capitalism that undergirds scholarship in cinema studies as well. Time Out The sure sign of globalization in India was the change in print culture—a large vibrant section of broadsheets had to reckon with digital presence. Along with the opening of the markets to the invasion of foreign publications with an eye towards the local market—Vogue India, Elle India, etc. among fashion magazines—the British weekly cultural magazine Time Out was seeking partners globally, and arrived in India in 2004 with a business partnership between Time Out Group Pvt. Ltd. and the industrial conglomerate Essar Group’s media wing, Paprika Media Ltd., as a fortnightly issuing from three cities: Time Out Mumbai, Time Out Delhi, and Time Out Bangalore.63 After a decade-long run during which it was available on newsstands in cities, airports, train stations, and bookshops, Time Out , citing changing patterns of readership, decided to shut its print shop in India and go online, on September 15, 2014. The long decade of print offers a view of cultural reporting; their brief, according to their primary reporter Nandini Ramnath, was to follow a ‘cool, quirky, edgy’ beat. Whether Time Out reporting bolstered these edgy scenes or if these moments of independent filmmaking arrived on their own steam, future scholars of print media can speculate. But there is no doubt that the reporters on the ground were posting stories on independent music,

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art, and above all, films. As Ramnath reminisces, since Mumbai did not have an underground cultural screen, a ‘soft alternative’ was palpable in the arts, distinct from the national and local cultural forms that survived on state subsidies and national bourgeois capital for years before. She lists the following moment as one which shaped the culture of the first decade of the new millennium that deserves recounting: the inauguration of Experimenta by Shai Heredia in 2003, and a follow up in 2005, which guaranteed its longevity as the pioneering film festival that showcased experimental works from the global scene and thus encouraging the possibilities of filmmakers to think of other forms besides narrative and documentary. The repertory section was crucial and Heredia’s programming salvaged auteurs from FD’s staff of filmmakers—S. Sukhdev for instance—and canonized Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar Be Dar (1988) as a cult classic, which it has remained ever since.64 Equally important was the robust documentary scene that agitated against state censorship and fortified the formation of Vikalp (Films for Freedom) that had its first film festival in Mumbai in February 2004, a six-day run that included films rejected by the state-run Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) in addition to the support of filmmakers who withdrew their works from the official film festival as a show of support.65 Vikalp’s relevance speaks directly to the ongoing contestations in civil society as the state continues to renege on constitutional rights to its citizens while opening its markets to global capitalism. In addition to film festivals, like the singular gay film festival, Kashish, in Mumbai, films clubs have been revived as is the case for Moca Club and Katha Film Circle. In Ramnath’s account, the rise of cable television forced the expansion of television beyond state-owned channels Doordarshan 1 and 2, and was crucial as a financial underwriter to many independent productions, many of whom served as fronts for international conglomerates that generated pseudonyms as one of the ways to circumvent Indian tax laws. For instance, UTV, a prominent financial backer, is incorporated as an Indian subsidiary of Walt Disney Productions that arrived in 1996. A glance at its roster reveals a line of support of allegedly independent productions, including Dibakar Banerjee’s Khosla ka Ghosla (2006) and several small Tamil and Telegu serials broadcast on cable television, are in fact backed by the multinational outfit Disney. At the local level, other kinds of financial arrangements that bore the whiff of independent productions were, however, short lived. Ramnath

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mentions Spot Boys that lasted for a short while (2005–10), a credible financier for small films as its name suggests. As we know from the narratives of global capitalism, fortunes of companies rise and fold, mergers expand already dominant companies, and renaming erases both previous financial portfolios and human names. For instance, connections between Spotlight Films, Pritish Nandy’s boutique production PNC, and financial records of independent producers like Jhamu Sugandh Productions, who rode the long first wave of globalization as a line-producer for both Mani Ratnam and Ramgopal Varma, would require the fine skills of forensics financial analysts. Every independent movement has its favourite underdog director and Anurag Kashyap was the chosen one in this first decade. His Paanch (2003) was banned and his second feature film Black Friday (2004) had long struggles with censorship for its recounting of the Mumbai blasts of 1993; it was eventually released in 2007. Kashyap’s skills as a scriptwriter had won wide acclaim for Ramgopal Varma’s Satya (1998). But Kashyap’s success with Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) in the global marketplace lifted him permanently out of the rough lands of edgy films into a Hindi cinema whose ballooning budgets, star cast, festival premieres at Cannes and Berlin, and award campaigns deemed them recognizably mainstream. Guneet Monga rose from the rank of assistant to the heights of creative producer for Anurag Kashyap Productions and oversaw various tie-ups with corporations as co-producers, including Jar Pictures. Ramnath’s fortnightly reviews of film clubs, documentary films, film festivals (OSEAN, KIFF), and book reviews gave the greatest weight to quirky films that deserve to be mentioned again for their distinctiveness: musician Srinivas Sunderrajan’s The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project (2010) and Greater Elephant (2012); Missed Call (2005) shot on 16mm over fifteen days and had a thunderous landing at Cannes as the opening film of the Indian Panorama (2005); Anand Gandhi’s years in television and theatre that ends with his thirty-minute film Right Here, Right Now and sets the ground for his film about philosophy, Ship of Theseus (2012); and Aditya Bhattacharya’s orphaned film Dubai Return (2005). Add to this Nagesh Kukunoor, Kaizad Gustav, Dev Benegal, Sunhil Sippy, Rahul Bose and Ram Madhvani, who were directing English language films. Ramnath covered stories on Indie Cinema that from the outside offers a ringside view of the goings on of this sizzling transition period, which is what it turned out to be, as large capital absorbed many of these themes, recruited its directors, left others behind, and gobbled some up

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and conscripted others across changing platforms. A settling of formulas and genres coalesced around what she refers to as ‘midstream cinema,’ which eschews the large-scale extravagance of Bollywood fare yet on a more bloated scale than previously smaller works. Once Time Out closed shop, Nandini Ramnath’s moved to Mint initially, and more recently to the online news magazine scroll.in, a move that reads as a biographical note that mirrors the ever-shifting sands of the self-styled independent Mumbai film industry and its attendant reception economies.66 Online platforms, especially blogs, that challenged Time Out ’s exclusive English writing on films include filmmaker Karan Bali’s Upperstall.com and now defunct www.passionforcinema.com overseen by Anurag Kashyap shaped the critical reception of films, resurrecting lost works, and expanding the vicissitudes of Mumbai-based Hindi language cinema beyond the template of Bollywood. The cycle of rise and fall of auteurs blunts and pushes mainstream cinema to remake itself given the sheer fact of propinquity, however fleeting these moments are. ‘Bombay Noir,’ Chapter 4, considers Ramgopal Varma’s trajectory and the quiet incursions of Sriram Raghavan’s films alongside lost works of a collective that were made for broadcast cable, Media Classic, which reshaped the contours of noir themes and styles of Hindi language cinema and later for multiplex theatres; returns to an early period and Kashyap’s role as part of a collective, Media Classic. The career of Vishal Bharadwaj ties closely with Kashyap’s currently, his rise from lyricist to director and producer of Hindi language cinema deserves a sustained study in future scholarship. I want to place these collective energies as counterpoint to Bollywood cinema that thrives on an audience in the diaspora and has equally peaked in cinema studies scholarship.67 At the same time, all too often, commercial success or market viability of these directors, no longer auteurs, leads to larger budgets and by extension, depletion of small-scale energies. Crime thrillers and neo-noirs bloated to crime sagas and political dramas in one direction, comedies expand into large budget romance comedies set in expensive locations on the other: well-oiled cycles of mergers and conglomerates. The rise of script writing workshops and demands of script pitches has forced an Americanized ‘talkie style’ across these films to the loss of experimenting with ‘cinematicity.’ In this regard, counter-narratives such as Rosie Thomas’s essays and book, Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies, remind us of the

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long durée of filmmaking where an independent spirit, often in the imperfect B-films, railed against the constituents of the mainstream cinema that had national and nationalist aspirations.68 Thomas’ attention to an earlier archive of films offers a corrective to the novelty attached to globalized production and circulations of these films in the era of liberalization and digital cinema. To write of such passing moments, often transitory, serves as a commitment in the following chapters of this book. Although Time Out Mumbai, as its beat suggests, did shore up the independent film scene in Mumbai with occasional reporting on burgeoning scenes in Kolkata, Bangalore, and Chennai, a review of these film cultures is gauged by the rise of boutique film festivals that have continued to balloon. As the curator for the London Indian Film Festival (LIFF) established in 2010, Naman Ramachandran continues to bring his long experience as a string reporter for Variety, Sight and Sound, and Cineuropa, with a focus on Indian films and his commitment to popular cinemas beyond Mumbai. This is apparent in his scholarship on film star Rajnikant that explores film style rather than fan club cultures.69 A preview of the programming at LIFF documents his palette attuned to independent films with prizes for short films. For instance, to premiere Anurag Kashyap’s omnibus Hindi language Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), Qaushiq Mukherjee’s (Q) Bengali language Gandu (2010), and Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s Tamil film Aaranya Kaandam (2010) in 2012 provides a clear curatorial mission to introduce the London, and by extension, a global audience to legions of independent auteurs emerging from India: Kashyap would make his first commercial success and leave the independent financial circuits; Q would fortify his status as a filmmaker whose films would rather seek a festival run than negotiate with moribund strictures of India’s film censorship authority, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC); and Kumararaja’s becomes a cult film that would soon be orphaned.70 Ramachandran’s own adventures with programming landed a script collaboration with Q that issued Brahman Naman (2016) and premiered at Sundance. However truncated this reporting of Ramachandran’s curatorial practice seems, and the evaluation of LIFF’s programming minimal, I wish to emphasize its status as a hub for the global circulation of independent films across festivals and the clout of a programmer’s whims and taste. Chapter 5, ‘Tamil New Wave,’ engages with the poetics and politics of film programming by signalling independent cinemas in equally large film cultures beyond Mumbai.

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Of course, the edge keeps moving and you cannot stop amateur filmmakers from seeking forms of storytelling across different platforms, mining greater affordances, and wider possibilities.

100 Years of Indian Cinema 2013 was a long year of bounty for the feature film, which I could not have imagined at the outset, having commenced my fieldwork in India with experimental filmmakers and video artists on the ground and eventually, amassing an archive that hitherto was not there for the asking. Even with my head firmly turned away from the feature film, tidings of festival openings, censorship disputes, digital distribution, private screenings, and the expansion of reviews onto social platforms were coming my way. There is no way that my own long innings with the feature film has faded in allure, like a moth to a flame I kept returning to it as an ongoing side-track that would coalesce in the form of this book. The long year begins in the middle of the previous year with the premiere of Amitabh Chakraborty’s Cosmic Sex (2012) at Osian Film Festival, August 2012, with the ‘Best Actor’ award bestowed upon Rii, and its subsequent run-ins with the Board of Censors ending with an online release of the film. All of this, and a close engagement with the film, will be fleshed out in Chapter 7, ‘Untitled: Amitabh Chakraborty’s Cinema.’ For now, I want to plant it as the forerunner in a period that would have other works equally engaging with the changing assemblage of the feature film in India, art cinema to independent. My period of research between 2013 and 2014 was marked by nationwide celebrations of a hundred years of Indian cinema with repertory screenings and conferences at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and CSDS. At the Films Division (FD) in Mumbai, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, V. S. Kundu, seconded from his years in the Haryana cadre, reignited a period of film society-style screenings. As part of these efforts, in June 2013 he oversaw a four-day repertory of ‘100 Years of Experimental Cinema in India’ by inviting guest curators filmmakers Ashish Avikunthak and Pankaj Rishi Kumar, who had already a track record of collaboration between themselves. Avikunthak’s work has firmly moved into the gallery space and is framed by Amrit Gangar’s curatorial statement ‘Prayoga Cinema’; his location as an academic at the University of Rhode Island in America had him living binationally and across metropoles of Kolkata, Mumbai, and New York. Kumar by contrast is a

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documentary director in his own right whose collaboration with Avikunthak assumes the form of editor that ended recently. Their programming was inspired by Shai Heredia’s annual programming for Experimenta since its inception in 2003. A long section was devoted to experiments in narrative feature films, so as to rouse the place of experiments in works that were independently produced and subtended state-dictated scriptures on scripts and story. Amitabh Chakraborty’s Kaal Abirathi (1989) was chosen as one centrepiece that pushed the envelope on the dominant idiom of art cinema. Its ravaged 35mm print from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) would still stand the test of time and find a new generation in the auditorium at FD that was built in the international style of Nehruvian India with the explicit purpose for encouraging art cinemas. A special screening of the cult classic, Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar (1988) would seal the possibilities of its digitization by NFDC the following year; Swaroop by this time had been anointed as the cult director by Experimenta’s curators for bucking the weightiness of art house films commandeered previously by Kumar Shahini and Mani Kaul. The celebration of Indian cinemas in the second decade of the twentyfirst century with a wholesale absorption of digital technologies in cinema would shore up questions of the ontology of cinema. While Bazin is the obvious place to turn from Paris to Pune, art house cinemas were asking the question of cinema as thought experiments alongside earlier works from India that had long been exploring the shape of time and space embedded in philosophy and aesthetics of various textual and oral traditions across the breadth of India. The post-screening discussion with a room also dotted with filmmakers stationed in the region would press on this question day after day with sharp attention to continuing hijacking of such questions in the direction of orientalism as embedded in the Indological inspired nomenclature ‘Prayoga.’ The insistence of a political art house cinema through the route of non-fiction film was offered as a different framing. In a series of additional events that exceeded the published programme was a presentation by Devdutt Trivedi, who had recently graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and written a thesis on Mani Kaul and Bresson’s films. Revising Deleuze through Mani Kaul’s practice was his offering that day, and subsequently, after the seminar he oversees a blog, writes essays, and reports on films for online sites to debate the case for cinema as thought experiment. His writing hit a feverish pitch with the release of two films that were dramatically different in their approaches

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to the onset of digital and their relationship to the relationship between film and philosophy: Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus (2012) and Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely (2012). Trivedi was not a singular figure in the emerging blogosphere but the voice that compared these films, favouring one over the other. In hindsight, I see merit in noting divergences in the films’ approaches to cinema and their vastly different audiences that would inform digital feature films in India, specifically Mumbai-based works. Premiering at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2012, Ship of Theseus would literally tackle the Greek philosopher Plutarch’s exploration of whether a ship would be the same if all of its parts had changed. Leaving aside the seafaring philosophizing of the Greeks, Gandhi’s own ship appears to be the form of Indian cinema as it morphs in the postcelluloid space straddling between television and digital technologies, from shoot to post, and takes the form of triptych or anthology film. In a self-serving manner, I can see the direct subversion of the cinema of interruptions structuring of popular cinemas here; equally at play is the rise of triptych as a transnational form since Amores Perros (2002) with a Tamil cinema interpretation in Guru (2007). Narrated as exploring philosophical ideas such as perception, the film casts a blind photographer, followed by a Jain monk’s crusade against animal testing, and closes with a moral tale on organ transplants that the rich procure across national borders. Three different explorations in a tightly written script, sequentially presented, reminiscent of both theatre and television offer a refreshing take on the long feature film assemblage, both art cinema and popular. To emphasize its mode of production reaffirms the film’s publicity that announces its digital shooting on Canon 1 EOS-1D Mark IV at one end, and seeking Béla Tarr’s sound designer in post, turns out to be a volte face since the Hungarian director’s commitment to celluloid is best recorded in his moratorium on filmmaking, literally, upon the release of The Turin Horse (2011). Ship of Theseus was a box office success that its home production unit, Recyclewallah, made good with tie-ups with Fortissimo, the international distribution outfit based in Amsterdam with an eye on Asian cinemas. As is the way of trade winds in the age of digital capitalism, the rise and fall of companies runs as one spine of a narrative. Fortissimo’s declaration of bankruptcy in August 2016 revealed a banking structure with a front office in Amsterdam and actual deals with Asian art house films being negotiated with offices in Hong Kong.71 To the relief of independent filmmakers, as Variety reported on the cusp of the Berlinale 2019,

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the company would be resurrected ‘from receivership by China Hehe Pictures’ by keeping its office in Amsterdam but moving operations to Beijing, which may point to Hehe’s backing from the e-commerce giant Alibaba.72 Anand Gandhi’s commitment to exploring the affordances of digital technology would have him explore VR cinema by committing to issuing VR documentaries through the ElseVR platform. In the realm of feature films, his collaboration as creative director with the debut filmmaker Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbaad (2018) would assure a wide festival circulation of this horror film commenting on avarice, a prescient social critique in an age of excess. There is no doubt that it splashes as good copy when Trivedi pits Ship of Theseus against Miss Lovely on the basis of their wide differences on the concepts of cinema, but little was said of their purchase for international distribution by the same Fortissimo. Nevertheless, Trivedi’s exaltation of Ahluwalia’s film is not the only reason for its return here, but the filmmaker’s allegiance to celluloid materiality in the sweep of digital technologies rolling into Mumbai invites a closer look at practice of media archaeologies in that long 2013. Putting aside the rising and falling fortunes, Fortissimo ensured a distribution of Miss Lovely after the film’s premiere in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes 2012, an easy passage to Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and onwards to an international market. ‘I wanted to take a shower after seeing the film’ burst out Robert Cagle, my friend and fellow-cinephile, after a screening at the University of Illinois, October 2013.73 The feeling of being soiled somehow, bonded the two of us during the public discussion I moderated afterwards, where I framed my own experience of viewing Miss Lovely as a ‘slow action film.’ Both reactions echo in Ahluwalia’s extensive interviews upon the film’s international release extolling the virtues of ‘C’ films that have lived in the shadows of Bollywood from the 1980s onwards. Without fussing or arguing his facile nomination of all of Bombay’s mainstream as ‘Bollywood,’ Ahluwalia’s keen sense of engaging with the lowest rungs of these film productions and their audacity to fly under the radar of censorship regulations writs large in various interviews that emerged on the heels of his film’s release and that coincided with the long year of centenary celebrations of Indian cinemas. Ahluwalia expresses little interest in these commemorative occasions, and my own evocation of his film against that backdrop is an attempt to undercut official narratives of national-popular cinemas. Rather, Miss Lovely demonstrates his deep affection for C-grade productions. That they happened to be soft porn films does little to deter

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his own commitment to their preservation as found footage in his own film as narrated to Sudarshan Ramani: Sudarshan Ramani: The film we see at the beginning, in the context we see here is quite beautiful (HOUSE NUMBER 13). The print quality is excellent too. Was it difficult getting the rights and the clip of that film? Ashim Ahluwalia: We restored all the old films that we used in Miss Lovely. The negatives were badly damaged—many were dug out of basements or back rooms after decades and had fungus all over them. It was quite a long haul, to track the filmmakers who were mostly dead, then find their families, find the rights holders; it became like an archaeology project, digging up an ancient civilisation of sleaze. But there was no other way to get access.74

Research for Miss Lovely—‘a trashy title,’ declares Ahluwalia—began over a decade earlier.75 In an earlier intimation of the film project as a documentary appears in another interview in 2004.76 Reviewing that conversation in the sweep of digital technologies, we can see Ahluwalia’s attention to the changing formats of cinemas as of the mid-1980s marked by the arrival of video porn, video parlours, and porn sold on burnt Video CDs (VCD). Narrated from the belly of his fieldwork research, C-film directors, distributors, and actors, he offers us a ringside view of this genre of filmmaking that had no studios to speak of, ‘only guys with handycams and access to empty flats, girls and one-hour hotel rooms…Most girls who have been busted, as porn is totally illegal in India, have been traced back to the A-grade Bollywood industry. They are mostly part of the extras unions as well.’77 Slated originally as a documentary film set in a milieu that produced ‘bits’—short sex films inserted into C-grade films—morphed into Miss Lovely, a feature film with bits of restored footage as an homage to the hard-working and exploited workers of the C-industry.78 Ahluwalia’s affection and familiarity with this genre is entwined with his peregrinations into South Mumbai’s landscape that included backrooms of B-film theatres, factory ruins before the time of intense speculation that would result in locked out mill-land being converted into malls and high-rise apartment buildings; the bars, hotels, and night spots that would render the patina of the 1970s and 1980s are slowly fading in the age of globalization. Despite his generous pointing and naming of these spaces in my

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conversations with him, on the privileging of these derelict spaces in the films, the actual piecing together of these in the film is nothing short of a maze that bewilders the spectator who moves from the swirling patterns of wallpaper in a hotel corridor to the run-down windowless office of a casting agent. As it turns out, reading the mise en scène and sequencing of space in this film and the others considered up close in this book has me in the grip of mazes and labyrinths. Here, I am beholden to Angela Ndalianis’ delightful reading of digital films as rehearsing space-bending narratives, akin to medieval European diagrams of maze and labyrinths, and invites the kind of immersion that a spectator submits to and a scholar deciphers through slow reading.79 To this incisive reading, I wish to add Warren Buckland’s identification of ‘puzzle’ films—another classificatory type of feature film.80 In myriad ways, both Ndalianis and Buckland’s innovative readings of recursive types from pre-modern narratives highlight a mediascape whose own promiscuity across various formats, expressed at times as spatial dispersion, has us searching deeper archives for novel ways to mark their distinctiveness while acknowledging their ability to play on twists and turns of narrative that demand our ‘interactivity, including video games.’81 By the time, Ahluwalia’s feature film was in the works five years prior to release, the shift to digital technologies was on the upswing in India; processing labs shuttered and digital editing ruled post-production, leaving Ahluwalia little options for processing in Mumbai, hence his choice of a post-postproduction facility in Berlin. The only trace of video turns out to be a weapon in a fratricide that Ahluwalia had planted and refers to in his interview with Ramani: Ramani: Miss Lovely is interesting for this sense of cinema swallowing everyone at the end, it’s not valedictory or hopeful about it. Ashim Ahluwalia: It’s about how cinema can kill you. It’s funny because an old and rather legendary critic told me that it’s the only film in the history of cinema that uses a VCR as a murder weapon! If that’s true, it’s odd nobody used that before because it’s such a physically practical device to kill someone yet it’s so incredibly symbolic about the end of celluloid and the beginning of digital. Godard used to refer to Cinema and Video as Cain and Abel, he saw one medium killing the other—much like two brothers in a fratricide, like Vicky & Sonu.82

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As a holdout against Sony and Panasonic’s invasion of digital cameras into the market since the 2000s, 16mm and 35mm film stock was procured as confirmed in an interview with Stephen Saito in online magazine Moveable Fest : There’s a great contradiction of this seedy world and the way you shoot it, in grand, full scope and vivid colours. Was that style something you immediately wanted for this story? I like that quality of the bizarre juxtaposition of an old school love of cinema as we knew it—predigital, widescreen, musical, the certain genres that come from studio filmmaking—predigital, widescreen, musical, the certain genres with this pretty kitchen-sink, hand-held formalism. I’ve never seen these two things put together and I really liked the idea that what if you go from widescreen musical to somebody killing someone [in] this very neo-realist [style], then you go to widescreen and it’s musical and lush, then you switch back, these combinations for me, [make it] a film about cinema, not really just the secret world or the B-grade world. In a way, it’s a post-cinematic way of thinking about cinema as a compendium of genres. It’s post-digital, the fact that we can put all this stuff together and make a pastiche, so it’s a new thing yet it references lots of old genres and old ideas of what makes a film a film.83

In a different interview on National Public Radio (NPR) with Arun Rath, more details surface on stock that throw light on the particular Indian stock that was procured84 : Rath: Yeah. And even deeper than that—predigital, widescreen, musical, the certain genres with that authenticity, there’s a quality to this film. I almost wonder, was this shot on film stock from the time? It seemed like it was actually produced in the ’80s. Ahluwalia: You know, in the ’80s, we didn’t have Kodak film stock in India. We had a—we had a very socialist stock that we made called Indu, and it had a very particular look. And I was really trying to look for that feeling, that sort of texture that the stock brought. What we did was we used a lot of expired film stock and shot on that. So, it had a kind of murky quality, but at the time, really helped in making it, as in most of it, as it is.

The question of the look of film as a form of intense attention to celluloid persists over several interviews with Ahluwalia. For instance, returning to

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his interview with Ramani in Projectorhead, we get details of his collaboration with K.U. Mohanan, an FTII-trained cinematographer. Between Ahluwalia’s American film school training at Bard College with a keen attention to film form forged with Mohanan’s craft shaped by European art house curriculum and years in documentary filmmaking, a look was developed as relayed to Saito: Saito: How did you create the film’s distinct look, this faded-out look of old Hindi film prints from the ’70s and ’80s? Ahluwalia: I wanted the feel of old 35mm Indu Film Stocks. ‘Indu’ means silver in Sanskrit and was manufactured by Hindustan Photo Films, our own socialist Indian film stock manufacturer. Until the late 1980s you couldn’t get Kodak easily because it was a ‘foreign’ import, so the bulk of the stuff was shot on Indu. Mohanan, my DOP, is a man who really comes from celluloid you know. We are both obsessed with labs, chemistry, grain, we spent a long time developing the look, doing tests. I love the Agfa stocks used by Japanese studios like Daiei and Nikkatsu in the 1950s where it looks like Technicolour but the greens and magentas are all fucked up. So I really wanted that look combined with the warmth of Indu, to push the dampness, the griminess, the claustrophobia and bring out the atmosphere of that era. We worked with a lab in Germany and the colourist was stunned that we got this look photochemically. I guess Miss Lovely is about cinema, so it had to be about film stock in a way.85

A further exposition of using found footage, a grounding of such training at Bard College from American experimental filmmaker teachers would prevail and surface as his response to Ramani: Ramani: So these were opticals made for original B films? Ahluwalia: Yeah, they actually took a lot of trouble to put those credits together, you know, making all these beautiful patterns with ink and mirrors. I worked with Satish, the last opticals guy in the business, and he had already shut shop by the time I started doing the credits for Miss Lovely. I didn’t want to try and emulate this digitally, it would just feel fake. Miss Lovely is full of recycled footage. All the C grade films that the Duggal Brothers make in the film are real sex horror films—some from directors of the ‘Golden Age’ of Indian exploitation—Mohan Bhakri, Vinod Talwar. The sex bits are real too, mostly shot by anonymous directors. Ironically, there isn’t just recycled sleaze in Miss Lovely but

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some reused ‘high art’ as well. A couple of shots of Sonu entering Bombay after the train scene come from a Mani Kaul film, Arrival (1980). He made it for Films Division, about immigrants coming to the city.

With keen attention to 35mm celluloid procured in India and processed in Germany, Miss Lovely would emerge as a particular kind of transnational cinema that reveled in being classified as ‘impure cinema.’86 It would take another two years before the film would have a commercial release in India, January 2014. If the details of production, post-production, and film festival inauguration suggest the entirety of the film’s dispositive, Ahluwalia was keenly aware that censorship regulations in India undergird the dispositive like no other detail.87 After enjoying international encomiums, including the prestigious filmmaker-artist residency as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SIFF), and an early festival screening at Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) in 2012, the time had come for theatrical distribution in India that entails submission to the Board of Censors in 2013. Contrary to their initial impression that the film would be banned, the producer Pinaki Banerjee and Ahluwalia were surprised to receive recommendations that tallied up to 157 cuts, about half the film. By then Gangs of Wasseypur had been released and Nawaz Siddiqui who had debuted in Miss Lovely had become a star to reckon in the burgeoning independent film culture underwritten by digital technologies. Citing Gangs as precedent for expletives and Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012) for deploying pixilation to camouflage nude bodies, Ahluwalia’s lengthy, often daily, negotiations with the Mumbai office of the Board of Censors resulted in a limited release in 2014 as well as a Blu-ray version in 2016. It won the Critics Jury Award at MAMI (2014) and ironically two National Awards, Special Jury Award for the director and another for Best Production Design. Obviously, Miss Lovely rigorously holds on to the possibilities in 35mm celluloid that do not dim with the ‘plasticity’ of digital cinema, the filmwork stands out as a placeholder for analogue medias even as digital technologies are taking hold in Indian feature film production.88 Echoes of recycling soundtrack and older films echo in Chapter 5, ‘Tamil New Wave Cinema,’ where I explore similar practices in both Thiagararaja Kumararaja’s Aaranya Kaandam (2010) and Sashikanth Ananthachari’s Veli (1995–2016).89

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The more pointed pairing in this book is with Amitabh Chakraborty’s film practice that is discussed in Chapter 7 of this book. Chakraborty’s Cosmic Sex (2012) had a different trajectory of production and release, yet consonant so as to consider it as homologous to Miss Lovely. Less enamoured with the archive of cinema per se, Chakraborty’s preoccupations are with seeking philosophies of cinema through the medium of the feature film, fiction and non-fiction, and from within the secret philosophies of Tantric and Sufism, which draw on a different casting of dark and slow cinemas. The distance in practices between the two filmmakers measures the vast terrain of contemporary Indian cinemas that this introduction frames them in (and the individual chapters’ choice of particular films endows them with sustained attention). Ahluwalia’s trajectory since Miss Lovely would veer towards engaging with both popular cinema—Daddy (2017) for instance—and entering the gallery space.90 The sure-fire mark of his influence is in the work of the assistants, notes Pinaki Banerjee, whose keen programming eye for films that buck the mainstream—however slim that moment of defiance is—has me appoint him as my most reliable interlocutor. In this circle of male friendship of assistants, films emerge that engage with each other with their backs turned to ‘Bollywood’ despite the propinquity of the directors’ station. Kabir Singh Choudhury’s Mehsampur (2018), a long format film, extends his earlier endeavours in a collaborative anthology film The Last Act (2012) commissioned by Anurag Kashyap through an innovative idea of a competition: twelve directors were chosen to direct a ten-minute film based on Kashyap’s plot.91 Set up as a travel film into Mehsampur in the Punjab hinterland, it is embarked upon by a documentary filmmaker exploring the situation leading up to the killing of the singer Chamkila in the 1980s.92 The film’s aleatory form, deservedly reviewed as ‘trippy’ after its film festival run, offers not only the thick context of the antagonisms of the Punjab 1980s but its long shadow cast into the millennium for the singers in Chamkila’s milieu. Mehsampur’s ability to burrow deeply into the unresolved trauma of antagonisms in Punjab of the 1980s, while continuously folding into its own ethics of filming these encounters, draws it close to the rehearsals of the questions of medium specificity in Miss Lovely.93 Another former assistant, Kabir Mehta, heads off in the direction of John and Jane’s genre mixing in his Buddha.mov by updating the conventions of documentary with confessional strains that undergirds amateur filmmaking. The film’s combination of cricket and sex offers an ethics

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of viewing in the age of personally uploaded works on online platforms. Pinaki Banerjee offers Ridham Janve’s The Gold-Laden Sheep and the Sacred Mountain (2018) as an iteration of slow cinema that is in intimate conversation with the pacing of Miss Lovely, despite the obvious differences in their respective mounting of mise en scène.94 Evoking this world of male bonding in the world of independent filmmaking, which starts in the economy of assistants and heads off with auteur ambitions, thick with coded exchanges with each other and seeking correspondences in their styles, is not an isolated phenomenon in Ashim Ahluwalia’s compass. The framing of homosocial bonds between directors, as a lens to consider the implicit audiences of these fiercely independent works, finds a fulsome engagement in Chapter 5 on ‘Tamil New Wave’ and ‘Bombay Noir.’ The third film I call on that was released in this long year of centenary celebrations was a small budget film, K.M. Kamal’s ID (2012). Inspired by a culture of collectives, three friends who had known each other since their undergraduate years, and later headed to FTII in a staggered timetable, concerted to the formation of Collective Phase One: cinematographer Madhu Neelakandan, editor D. Ajithkumar, and director K.M. Kamal. A friend from FTII and Kerala, cinematographer Rajeev Ravi would form the fourth coordinate; sound designer Resul Pookutty would join them soon after. If the name of the collective has the ring of a land development scheme, it was not off the mark since their own mandate was to conceive of cinema that lies in the curve from land to screen so as to include a commitment to farming as a way to hold off global corporatization of agriculture, which was sweeping over India under Monsanto, the global conglomerate. What united these filmmakers together was a commitment to move away from the grand narratives of politics, economics, cinema, and farming, and decidedly turn towards smaller stories and smaller films. All of the members are graduates of FTII. Kamal recalls that he was the last one to join since eking a career as a filmmaker was not feasible after graduation, instead he joined the ranks of journalism by writing for Sameeksha, a political magazine founded by writer and political activist, K.Venu in 1992. After two years of journalism and an eye-opening visit to FTII to visit his former classmates, film school emerged as a possible destination; the immense freedom of experimentation enjoyed at FTII is what had him spellbound. He remembers watching students revelling under the Wisdom Tree late into the night, the former environs of Prabhat Studio, yet several others were clocking hours in editing suites

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and sound studios to finish their projects.95 Looking at the roster of students from Kerala who headed to FTII, it comes as no surprise that most of them stoked their cinephile spirit as members of film societies and short-run film appreciation courses. Kamal and his posse of friends were members of Sumangala Film Society during their college years in Kothamangalam, 1991–94; Anthony Abraham was the founding secretary since the late 1970s, considered the golden era of film societies spearheaded initially by Adoor Gopalakrishnan (hereafter Adoor) at his Chitrakala Parishad in Trivandrum.96 Since Kamal was strapped for the fifty rupees membership fees, Abraham opened the screenings to him for gratis. Listening to Kamal narrate the arrival of film packages from the various embassies to Kothamangalam conjures the frisson that these student film societies nurtured with cinema. The first package of New Latin American Cinema sent from the Cuban embassy had a ‘quality of light different from the flat lighting of our mainstream films. I was seeing nature for the first time; Miguel Littín’s Alsino and the Condor (1983)’ he recalls. On another occasion, two German cultural officers from the Consulate in Madras drove in a van and arrived with a treasure chest of fifty cans of films, offering the society a choice of their preferences; Fassbinder’s works were their choice. Between these projections, Kamal recalls a precocious absorption in world cinema that arrived in waves from the National Film Archives, under the stewardship of an original cinephile, P.K. Nair. Kamal was struck by the risks and boldness of narrative time in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964), a multigeneration FTII favourite as I would discover in my various conversations over the years, electrified by Eisenstein’s films and their radical editing, and bewildered by Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972).97 Further access to the nuts and bolts of filmmaking materialized in the immersive conversations and classroom sessions with cinematographer, Sunny Joseph, over a period of four days, who had shot many of the films of parallel cinema across India. Also programmed and available for post-screening discussion were stalwarts of Kerala-based filmmakers, often classified as doyens of the parallel cinema movement of the 1970s onwards: a first generation FTII director Adoor and a self-made filmmaker, G. Aravindan. Over one summer, Kamal won a place at an eight-day film appreciation course at Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, an initiative rolled out by the National Film Archive (NFAI) and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to disseminate the appreciation of cinema, long in place by the Film Inquiry Committee of 1954.

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The passage from film society enthusiasm to the rigours of film schools repeats as a retroactive routine in many of the filmmakers’ narratives featured in this book, the route to forge a collective beyond filmmaking a little unusual. The group chose K.M. Kamal’s ten-page synopsis as their first venture. Inspired by a conversation with a classmate from FTII, Archana Menon, who recounted an incident of a painter collapsing in her apartment while executing his task turns out to be the kernel of the script. The spirit of collective action would underwrite the first film, Kamal’s ID (2012), which had the support from the environmental and social activist Medha Patkar’s National Alliance to navigate through the neighbourhood surrounding Mankud Station, the makeshift homes of Rafey Nagar and beyond that the protagonist, Charu, heads towards in search of the painter who collapsed in her apartment and soon thereafter dies. In a different direction that involves casting, Collective Phase One teamed up with Hamsafar Trust, a group formed by sexual minorities and transgender communities in Mumbai, to collaborate on a sequence that has Charu being led through zigzag alleys of Rafey Nagar and wending through a Bollywood style dance class led by transgenders. Careening to the end of the film, Charu is shepherded through the slums by one of the members of Hamsafar Trust who doubles as an actor. The charter for division of labour and resources between them towards the production of their first film directed by K.M. Kamal was to dispense with monetization altogether; each member of Collective Phase One was to contribute their skills, pay for themselves and their department. As Kamal conveys, if produced as an independent film, ID would have cost seventy-five lakh rupees, whereas it capped at a shoestring budget of fifteen lakh rupees entirely subject to a different set of accounting principles. Their idea was to ‘crack’ the principle of filmmaking by banking on camaraderie and friendship as gifts between them. All kinds of subterfuges were embraced, including riding the tail wind of big productions. The mise en scène of the apartment, for instance, was tied to the production of shooting Anurag Kashyap’s big-budget, two-part film Gangs of Wasseypur that Rajeev Ravi was shooting as the principal DOP. His lengthy sojourn in Mumbai, Kamal recalls, required an apartment of his own that they devised would double as the principal location for ID. Geethu Mohandas, a filmmaker, and Kamal headed off to choose an apartment that would have a view of roads and skyline; Charu’s apartment provides her, as per script, a high angle shot of the roads below. They settled on an apartment in the Lokhandwala complex

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of Andheri, crediting Kashyap’s production company Jar Pictures as one of the producers. The verticality of apartment buildings and characters descending and ascending the elevator follow features of contemporary Asian horror films that resonate here as well: a top shot of a cramped space of the elevator with the watchman, the comatose painter, a helper, and Charu conveys claustrophobia as the material for impending doom. The perennial breakdown of elevators between floors does not work as a gag but provokes the frustration of belatedness that surrounds Charu while she contends with the logistics of transporting the fainted painter’s body to a hospital. The sensation akin to horror films—(Ju-on) (2002) for instance—emits from these early moments in the film—that includes the watchman fixing the pulley on the rooftop of the apartment building with Charu in tow— and assumes the expression of class inequalities that the film offers as its opening only to unravel horizontally with Charu’s search for the painter’s identity across the city at hospitals, morgues, police stations, and into the labyrinthine lanes of the low slung slums. Shot linearly by R. Madhu Neelakandan, the collective chose a lowend camera, Canon 5D Mark 2 camera with regular lenses. While the shoot was entirely in Mumbai and in a short period of time, postproduction took six to eight months that had Kamal waiting for his friends to carve time between other projects. Ajithkumar (Ajith) was in charge of editing and did so on AVID at his studio in Trivandrum on AVID editing programme, squeezing stints between editing mainstream films directed by Lenin Rajendran and TK Sashikumar who had earned the reputation of auteurs; the latter was the vice-chairman of the storied film society Chalachitra Academy. Kamal recalls camping out in Ajith’s home and waiting long days and months that had him finish Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, a tome of a novel, in ‘an unprecedented stretch of two weeks.’ After the editing, Kamal returned to Mumbai to work on the sound with Resul Pookutty at his Canary Studios. As expected, the work on this non-monetized film was slotted between larger films that were generating income for the sound studio. A fellow classmate from FTII, Anirban, offered to work on the sound mixing for free (while working on Rajkumar Hirani’s films and Salman Khan vehicles). A crucial part of the film design entailed calibrating varying acoustic registers in the film from the apartment to various spaces in the city and cell phone conversations, both on-screen and off-screen. Rajeev Ravi’s cinematography for Kashyap’s film was winding down and his post-production work including

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colouring at Prasad Lab brought a providential subvention for the film, a tidy sum of ten lakh rupees towards the use of the digital studio with the expertise of the accomplished colourist Jaydev. With prevailing industry standards contributing to the production process of Kamal’s ID, the impression that the film was being backed by a big budget was precisely the misperception that Busan International Festival’s post-production funds conveyed when an application was submitted. After translating and adjusting for the actual amount expended on production, Busan rallied around to programme the film in their 2012 line-up. Busan’s dedicated local audience draws film programmers worldwide as the hub for Asian cinemas and as the prime site for seeing first-time directors given their dedicated funding for a range of activities from script pitches to post-production. Kamal’s premiere screening benefitted from this mix of audience with an unexpected twist. As the film opened and with the first lines of the dialogue minutes into the film, the embedded English subtitles were not displaying through the DCP. The screening was halted and the projectionist was alarmed at the programming glitch that could not be fixed. Kamal reassured the programmers that the Korean subtitles would be fine since most of the audience was local, save a sprinkling of foreign delegates. It was one of the foreign delegates, a writer from Les Cahiers du Cinema who strongly recommended the film to the Three Continents Nantes Film Festival, November 2012, and also wrote a glowing review in his magazine.98 The circulation of the film since 2012 bears the markings of a festival film: Marrakech Film Festival December 2012; International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), December 2012, where it won the NETPAC Award; Torino Film Festival, December 2012; and in competition for International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in November 2012. In 2013, ID travelled to International Film Festival Rotterdam, Deauville Film Festival, La Rochelle International Film Festival, and more. I saw it finally, not in Busan in 2012, because of a scheduling conflict, but at a screening at the National Film Archive as part of the schedule of film appreciation courses in June 2013. ID’s successful run at festivals after Busan meant that the film had been overlooked by Cannes, Venice, and Toronto, the headline festivals that start the cycle earlier in the year. There was a reason for this that ties the fortunes of small and independent films from India, in the postliberalization era, with international distribution agencies. The path to the economy of international festivals, as aided by Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, is through the International Film Festival of India

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(IFFI), which has been sponsoring a pitch session called Works in Progress Lab as part of its Film Market. Collective Phase withdrew their first film from 2010 Film Market after an initial submission letter reasoning among themselves that they would seek other venues, a miscalculation in hindsight. It was in 2010 that Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus received the fillip promised at the Lab by drawing the attention of Fortissimo; additional goodwill came from Shekhar Kapur, the Indian origin film director, and Marco Müller, a curator of Rome Film Festival and subsequently of several more in China. Fortissimo had the interest and clout to place Asian films at the best film festivals, better venues for an international market surmises Kamal, who is only echoing the doxa circulating among filmmakers in India. Given Collective Phase One’s commitment to barter and gift exchanges, they were keenly aware of the large sums that independent films had to invest in the distribution of a film well after producing it on a shoestring budget. For instance, screening of small, independent works, often one-off screenings to a week-long stretch, has been on the programming schedule of PVR Cinemas, a theatre corporation in Delhi and Mumbai. However, a filmmaker has to offer fifteen lakh rupees as an initial investment to PVR, a budget that is double of ID’s outlay.99 Foregoing that path of screening, the collective launched its model of distribution that included distributing DVDs and sending online links for free, and still managed to break even with fifty screenings in Kerala. And then Netflix arrived in India. ID was acquired in 2014 by Netflix and that payment allowed the collective to earn profits for the first time; contracts last five years and Kamal’s film is once again offline and available gratis from Collective Phase One. As imbricated as ID’s production and distribution are as testaments of born-digital, borne in the circuits of digital delivery and digital display— materializations of digital filmmaking—the rigours of training in analogue at FTII, are equally evident in the feature film. Kamal recalls the process of chancing upon Sikkimese native, Geetanjali Thapa, as the ideal character to play the immigrant in Mumbai with ambitions of joining the global marketplace and she does so by being offered a job based on her market analysis of Adidas in India. Sharing a flat with two other women friends, whose boyfriends weave in and out of their lives over a period of what looks like two days with a night of partying, captures the lives of a novice, ascendant, globalizing corporate class. As mentioned earlier, the other immigrant to the city is a painter whose identity is sought after he dies,

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fainting mid-task in Charu’s apartment. Kamal recalls writing the script when reports of ethnic antagonisms were on the rise, despite large-scale internal migration at various levels: in Bangalore, for instance, lynching of north-easterners, who profile like Charu’s façade, was rampant; random attacks against south Indians was prevalent in several northern states. To capture this tension between promise of economic prosperity at the heart of a globalizing economy on the one hand, and trenchant inequities of caste and class, that were far from being erased in the steam engine of digital capitalism, on the other, emphasizes this condition as digital precarity.100 These textures of inequities and unevenness of capitalism as digital precarity have an undulating effect throughout the film, exploiting the idea of scale. As committed as the film unit was to using a single camera for the shoot, the scene when Charu heads to Mankud to look for Samir, and seeks out a clutch of labourers who respond to her solicitations, required multiple cameras, a throwback to the filmmakers’ analogue training. This scene is cut from various angles, revealing a number of set ups, which is precisely what Kamal admits to. Four cameras were commissioned: three different Canon 5D DSLRs, a Nikon 7D (2), and Geethanjali— as Charu—had a GoPro on her attire. In post-production, they worked with a visual effects expert to erase the data of camerapersons who had to be present to shoot from other angles. This was the film’s only special effect, claims Kamal, the only section that the rendered data was erased and substituted with other data that includes persons and space. Looking at the scene again, it allows us to see impossible points of view that construct this scene: match on action of analogue editing alongside handheld footage realized by the mobility of the smaller, not necessarily lightweight, Canon 5D that curves across hurdles of faces. Together, the fiction held up is to make the recording apparatus invisible, drawing us into the world of a film, which rations its own exposure to digital devices and props. Consider for instance, that we do not see these devices ever being charged in the film, whose narrative temporality covers two days— a detail that would have spun a gag of breakdowns not that different from the lift shutting down between floors, and our travel up to the gear box located in the rooftop of the apartment building. Such measured allotments of digital devices allow us to consider the film’s commitment to miniaturizing screen activity and screen size as another form of small budget filmmaking, at the register of plot and story.101

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The slim script and minimal sets congeal around props in the film. The largest screen is reserved for French windows off the dining area that look upon the monsoon drenched streets of Andheri, the favoured location from the initial reconnaissance trip. As the film progresses, screens diminish in size progressively. At Charu’s home, we see an open laptop that she approaches once, but whose upright screen suggests recent use. But the film endows the small screens of mobile phones the most intense expression of screens. The iPhone trademark logo is frequently apparent, as Charu holds the phone close to her ear during her flight across the city; closer inspection allows us to date it as model 4. Although subsequent models will have greater capacity to shoot moving image, this touch phone was already advanced in its ability to store data, a fact that this film will display in a photorealist image of Samir’s corpse that Charu ‘snaps’ when identifying his body at the morgue. Samir’s phone, which Charu retrieves from his belongings along with his wallet, is a pushbutton model of a Nokia phone whose SIM card allows for text messages; as a prop this one was the director’s own phone! Extreme close-ups of messages displayed the backlit screen from the carrier, Vodafone, transpires a bill not paid, a low balance on accounts, and an incomplete registration— features that add up to a pre-paid plan favoured by users on a tight budget. The differences in scale of resolution act as markers of class in a hierarchy of images that Hito Steyerl notes as dictates of visual capitalism: the push button Nokia probably had a screen of 400 × 600 pixels in contrast to million pixels on an iPhone 4. To look for the owner of the phone through registration now seems obvious, since David Simon’s television show The Wire has demonstrated the countless ways in which mobile phones are hotspots of data, ripe for the execution of state surveillance technologies, in large part because of their maps of connectivity to and between telecommunications towers. Yet, the fiction of the film holds up a window to a world currently free of fully networked societies yet on the verge of it. Kamal recalls with horror how, in less than a year of the film’s release, the Indian state with technological undergirding from Infosys, would launch a campaign for mandatory identity cards; the Aadhar card, which research by civil rights activists reveals, is nothing short of a deployment of wholescale surveillance technologies, in replacement of ration cards that promised distribution of food. There were discussions among the members of the collective to change the title of the film as a way of distancing the plotline of their film from the state’s sinister plots, but they let it lie. It does

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indeed stand as a testament to a film’s thought experiment in the digital age that exceeds its own script. ID’s festival circulation did encourage others, less benign, towards filmmaking. Programmed at the Lost Angeles Film Festival 2013, one of the jurors, filmmaker Sean Baker, was so inspired by its formats and plot that he pushed his own film, Tangerine (2015) to be conceived entirely on an iPhone, which by then had the data capacity for film-like simulations. Due to visa rejections, Kamal could not attend the film festival but a Facebook camaraderie and acknowledgement has come his way from Sean Baker. (In Mumbai, Shlok Sharma has made films on iPhone 6S Plus; Lens (2016), a Tamil film, was shot on Skype). The affordances of the iPhone and Android devices receive a fulsome exploration in cinematographer Ranjan Palit’s first feature Lord of the Orphans (2018), a keen example of a small budget film, a one-person crew to be precise, that exploited the affordances of the phone’s camera. Collective Phase One has emerged as a model for other collectives that have been forged with an eye towards reducing the scale of production of feature films and by actively locating sites of activity away from mainstream industries. Echoing the pioneering spirit of YUKT Film Cooperative that produced Ghashiram Kotwal (1976), the field of digital cinemas has encouraged the formation of film collectives such as Kazcha Film Forum, Ektara Collective, and Human Trail Pictures, whose films figure in this book’s conclusion, ‘Time Out,’ as part of reconfiguring digital affordances. Kazcha’s Sexy Durga, directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidaran, has an advance consideration in Chapter 6 ‘Road Movie,’ placed alongside two independent films: Malay Bhattacharya’s Kahini (1997)— which has a precarious existence in analogue and only available as a compromised DVD—and Babu Easwar Prasad’s Gaali Beeja/Wind Seed (2015)—a digitally born film made on a shoestring budget.

Curating, Pedagogy, Scholarship We are experiencing a renaissance in feature films, both short and long. That is the impression and verdict of curators and filmmakers alike looking at world cinemas. It is now possible to see settings and rhythms in films that mix styles and themes of home movies, cinema verité, theatre, videography, televisual, and essayistic—hybrid forms that bear testimony to the affordances of the digital in an unprecedented manner. Evoking William Brown’s terms, digital cinema is ‘super cinema.’102 In my decadelong and ongoing collaboration with 3rd i Film Festival, San Francisco,

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as curator-at-large, since the definitive shift to DCP works and availability of Vimeo links at the end of the last decade, we have noticed a sharp increase in the number of films that were doing the rounds, starting at Cannes in May and heading to the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFLA) in April. As a festival committed to South Asian film cultures, we encourage post-national filmmaking, and in recent years, we have previewed works emerging from locations that are outside of traditional film production structures. It is now possible to make films on your laptop without the accoutrements of stars, special effects, and of course, laboratory processing, which is now an active choice rather than a default option. It is now possible to review films from first-time filmmakers, amateurs, who have never been to film schools, yet have embraced the medium, from handling lighter cameras to fiddling with editing programmes. In no uncertain terms, scales of production—from shooting to delivery and dissemination across platforms, from computers to mobile phones—have changed what we understand as cinema, and in this book, specifically the feature film. Auteurs have emerged in these digitally born films. Rima Das, for instance, is an autodidact whose short films and long-feature Assamese films have had premieres at Cannes and have been on the roster of India’s entries to the Oscars. At 3rd i, screenings of Village Rockstars (2017) and Bulbul Can Sing (2018) were shown at the large Castro Theatre, previously reserved for large-scale films with stars and special effects, which were routinely scheduled as ‘Bollywood Night.’ To state the obvious with thrill: a woman filmmaker from Assam has opened the portals to a culture of cinema in a linguistic region that has seen a slim output for decades. A cursory look at this film culture that direly needs scholarship and video essays, notes this resurgence, with the inauguration of the Brahmaputra Valley Film Festival since 2013, and the emergence of additional auteurs like Bhaskar Hazarika, who grafted ethnography and horror in Aamis/ Ravening (2019), a festival favourite that year. There is a temptation to write of these filmmakers as autochthonously emerging out of nowhere into the circuits of festivals on an international stage, an assumption that shuts off a cinephile culture of watching films on the very portals that these films would emerge from—online sites. While reportage and ethnographic research by future writers will throw light on the culture of video parlours and bit-torrent-cinemas that created cinephilefilmmakers who may have tested their skills on short film competitions on television—a confluence that spurred a strain of independent films in

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Tamil, outside the studio system of Chennai. Mamta Murthy’s Fried Fish, Chicken Soup, and a Premiere Show (2012). Murthy documents a film culture in the militarized zone of Manipur, dotted with video parlours devoted to viewing East Asian cinemas that inspired amateur filmmakers, a possible framing for the outburst of filmmaking in nearby Assam. Reviewing the large number of films that could not all fit into a fourday film festival had us devise a focused curatorial theme that would allow us to take stock of trends, and schedule them at a time outside our annual shindig. ‘Cruel Cinema: Tamil New Wave Cinema’ (May 2011) was one such programme that was inaugurated in collaboration with the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) and receives an expansive engagement in Chapter 5, ‘Tamil New Wave’ cinemas.103 These offshoots and repertory screenings reveal burgeoning scenes of filmmaking that have struck out alternative screening options even if their narratives are not that distant from independent and popular cinemas. Between the tsunami of screeners for 3rd i viewing, month after a month for over a decade, that permits a tracking of one through-line of research, my own archive for this book was consolidated during a twoyear research project ‘Long, Short, Lost: Experimental Film and Video Practices in India.’ I want to emphasize the quest for lost works that I was spurred on to locate, with the conceit that these films offered possibilities beyond the stranglehold of the narratives of popular cinemas. At times, the cult status of these works cherished among filmmakers set a precedent that lead me to the doomed status of single prints of 35mm films that were at large after an international film festival or languishing in the back rooms of bureaucratic offices. The search for prints muddied the demarcation between analogue films and digital copies, and I more often than not had to rely on VHS copies of televised films that were subsequently transferred onto a DVD. The constitution of the archive for this book has been from ground up, with no real building to arrive at, no catalogues to browse through, and no viewing stations to sit at. Absence of an already given archive speaks to the precarity of such institutions in postcolonial nations, laying to waste a heritage of cinema. The archive as medium support informs Chapter 2, ‘Minding the Gap.’ Watching many of these works had me enthralled, their dismal material conditions part of the allure of studying them, and have nudged me towards writing about alternative paths of cinemas embarked on in these films. Long drawn-out conversations with filmmakers over many years, watching them at a shoot, and hearing them engage with their practice

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after screenings was part of the urban ethnography. These extra-textual details have emerged as crucial framing devices in my theorization of their practice. More often than not, their films defy conventional cause and effect energies of popular cinemas by staging an attention to duration that deserves our attention, however belated. Ambiguity and opacity most acutely shape the relationship between sound and image in these films, however deteriorated, and invite novel and radical understanding of cinema, popular to art. The consideration of marginal and lost works is present in all of the chapters in this book and most fully realized in the last two chapters, ‘Road Movie’ and ‘Untitled: Amitabh Chakraborty’s Cinema.’ These are films that have had a skittish relationship to festivals and yet their cult status reveals a philosophy of cinema that seems to reach this viewer in the age of the digital. Against presumptions of speed in digital filmmaking and the scattered attention of viewers, there has been a steady crop of films contending with duration. Inspired by Ira Jaffe’s formulation and slow philosophy, Chapter 3 ‘Slowing Down’ looks at a range of expressions of duration and attentiveness that arrived between 2014 and 2016.104 Capping Part I, Chapter 3 pairs well with Chapter 2’s exploration of darkness; cinemas dark and slow that echo through the chapters of Part II. The default drive between curating for 3rd i Film Festival and my own research has been a predisposition towards looking for new and lost works during biannual trips to India and in an archive that survives on hard drives, pen drives, links, and DVDs. As a university scholar and teacher, I know that shaping an archive and choosing one film over another is no different from designing semester long courses that insist on the art of cinema as a vibrant area of study. The pedagogical design I have chosen over the years has been to recognize and study singular film texts: a minute or two of a moving image receives our sustained collective attention (‘radical formalism’ as Eugenia Brinkman has offered in a different kind of way) in class.105 I do not teach courses on Indian cinemas, rather have made my commitment to immerse my students in world cinemas and theories of the moving image. Films and video art from India, provisional monikers that have varying emphases, are what I return to in a solitary fashion in my own writing. The working advantage over the years has been to consider how the films I write about are contiguous with the films I teach every semester. An implicit cross-pollination of framing takes over and relays between the works I teach and the ones I write on, associations between them come alive in the dreamwork of writing. That I can view

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and engage with films across time and space casts the texture of an immigrant pedagogue whose deep and archaic familiarity with one national archive with different language cinemas and serves as a secret language that devises courses in cinemas from elsewhere. This seems like the stealth work of a cosmopolitan, who moves between accented cinemas, echoing Hamid Naficy, and in the process undercuts the label of national cinemas for its restrictiveness.106 To teach world cinemas is to live in the world and to write of films that address a world in post-national film cultures is to honour their worlding.107 Reading single films is a method.108 ‘You enter the delirium of the text,’ the experimental poet and art theorist Roberto Tejada declares, in an act of complicity that scholars are fortunate enough to find with fellow travellers.109 The daily exercise of close and slow reading of films, day after day, with students, offers an unprecedented opportunity that can barely be quantified but whose relevance returns during sequestered times of writing. Far from closing the world, such attention draws us into the film’s own language and equally, in the opposite direction, its relationship to other works of art and moving image practices: music, architecture, sculpture, painting, video, and television. Showering adulation on the films is how I describe these lessons with my students, who in turn, as aspiring filmmakers, realize that their own practice heads off in unchartered directions and with an unexpected finesse that they delight in. Their engagements inspire my own continuing free fall into close readings that the films lure me into, that is my own ethic of reading, that films know more than us, and that films are intelligent beings. The readings themselves emerge from the many pleasures of viewing the films—the name of the format I hold onto even as they arrive in various mediums and devices that I hope will be seen as gifts from this writer to the filmmaker-auteurs whose theorization of their practice has been a model for this writing as well. If modularity shapes the introduction to the book, lattice-like are its chapters. In each chapter, I have resorted to classificatory terms familiar in Cinema Studies scholarship as recognizable framing devices to hold my close engagement with texts: festival films, noir, new wave, road, art cinema, archives, and auteurs. At times, I have permitted myself neologisms—Bombay Noir, neighbourhood films, cruel cinema—to point to local film cultures that are less attuned to global cinephilia. Three moves, three films, three film cultures offer an additional structure to each of these chapters, an arrangement of threes that I have long borrowed from

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John Baldessari’s curatorial brief at the Hirshhorn Museum when he had the backrooms stacked with works not exhibited at his disposal.110 I translate an arrangement of three as a move away from dualisms, pairings, and antagonisms, and instead towards loose triangulations among three works whose orchestrations bear the signature of the writer, who relies on associations unleashed while watching the films in the darkness of theatres, or darkness simulated in makeshift viewing rooms, translating a cinephile’s desires into a scholar’s project.

Notes 1. Soumitra Ranade’s FTII Diploma film, Apostate, is an extraordinary experiment in decoupling sound and image, the reason I first met him in 2012. Apostate is part of my forthcoming project on experimental cinema and video practices. 2. I have benefitted from the following authors for drawing attention to the wonders of compositing: Lev Manovich, ‘After Effects or the Velvet Revolution,’ Millennium Film Journal 45–46 (2006): 5–19. Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 3. For a pioneering work that drew a geometry of relations between European art and films, see Standish D. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema (New York: NYU Press, 1975). The relationship between fine arts and film has a long rich history, a topic that I shall be pursuing in a forthcoming project. Among the published articles pursuing this area, see Aparna Frank, ‘Questions for Kumar Shahani- Interview,’ Synoptique 3.1 (2014): 117. 4. Matthew Fuller, Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 5. I am implicitly referring to Ranbir Kaleka’s video art. See my essay ‘Intermedial Circularities in Ranbir Kaleka’s Video Works,’ in Ranbir Kaleka: Moving Image Works, ed. Hemant Sareen (Berlin: Kerber Verlag, 2018), 138–61. 6. Raymond Bellour, Between-the-Images (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2013). 7. André Bazin, ‘In Defense of Mixed Cinema,’ in What Is Cinema? Volume 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 8. Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev, eds., Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013). 9. Lúcia Nagib, ‘The Politics of Impurity,’ in Impure Cinema, 21–40.

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10. To get to the point of impure cinemas as holding out possibilities for challenging the limits of film as a medium that has an extensive stronghold on the idea of representation, Nagib draws on Jacques Rancière’s formulation of dissensus. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010). I have benefitted from the fine collection of essays on ‘cinematicity’: Jeffrey Geiger and Karen Littau, eds., Cinematicity in Media History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 11. Syed Akbar Hyder, ‘Azad, Josh, and the Aesthetics of Love,’ Presentation, Harvard University, n.d. 12. Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 13. To date, I find Michael Betancourt’s writings to be the sharpest analysis of digital capitalism. I want to single out Michael Betancourt, The Critique of Digital Capitalism: An Analysis of the Political Economy of Digital Culture and Technology (Santa Barbara: Punctum Books, 2015). On a splendid evaluation of digital waste, see Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). 14. Personal communication with Bina Paul, July 2015. Mani Ratnam sought Suma Josson’s Blood Yatra (1993) as a document of the communal riots that he subsequently filmed in his Bombay (1995), a detail that I cite in my book on his film Bombay (London: BFI Publishing, 2005). 15. For instance, I conclude my Cinema of Interruptions (2002) with a reading of CGI and morphing in two Tamil films—Alaipayuthey/Waves (2000) and Hey! Ram (2000)—as forms of spectacle. 16. For an excellent exploration of similar issues, see Isabelle F. McNeill, Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 17. I list scholarship that I return to year after year: Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman, eds., Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable: The Screen Arts in the Digital Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998). Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

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André Gaudreault, and Phillipe Marion, The End of Cinema: A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012). Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Andrew Utterson, From IBM to MGM: Cinema at the Dawn of the Digital Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On special effects, see: Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Michele Pierson, Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Ariel Rogers, Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Vivian Sobchack, ed., Meta Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Kristen Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). For its breadth of scholarship and keen attention to medium formats, I have been continually inspired and informed by Sean Cubbitt’s scholarship, whose presence is marked at various moments in the book: Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1998). ———. The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). ———. The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014). For scholarship beyond American cinema, I am grateful to the following tracts for serving as companions: Adam Lowenstein, Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, & the Age of Digital Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

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Isabelle F. McNeill, Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012). For their attention to cinematic apparatus, the two-volume anthology: François Albera and Maria Tortajada, eds., Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, trans. Lance Hewson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). ———. Cine-Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media, trans. Franck le Gac (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). 18. No citation would adequately acknowledge Raymond Bellour’s influence in my work before this current project and into the future. For a collection of his essays over many years and across journals, see Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). For a collection of essays on the relationship between film, photography, and video, see: Raymond Bellour, Between-the-Images (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2011). ———. ‘Layers of Images,’ Critical Inquiry 43.3 (2017): 617–49. 19. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 20. Ágnes Peth˝ o’s attention to poetics of intermediality are many, and her projects remind us of the poetics of close readings. There are many citations to her and her colleagues’ work in subsequent chapters, for now I offer one prevailing aspect: Ágnes Peth˝ o, Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the Inbetween (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). 21. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Marsha Kinder’s essays find specific engagements in subsequent chapters. For now, I want to note the co-edited anthology that serves as a crucial forum for essays on reading in the age of transmedia. Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson, Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

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22. I received in my correspondence with Raqs Media Collective, a long version of their interview with Ellen Mara De Wachter. Shorter versions of the longer interview are available in the following forums: Ellen Mara De Wachter, ‘How to Collaborate: 25 Leading Art Collectives Share Their Creative Processes, Part 1,’ Artspace, April 13, 2017. Ellen Mara De Wachter, Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2018): 46–53. 23. Raqs Media Collective, ed., Double Take: Looking at the Documentary (New Delhi: Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in association with the Public Service Broadcasting Trust, 2000). 24. Rhizome Interview, 1, n.d. As with most online magazines with limited archiving capability, this interview with Rhizome is no longer available in its entirety. Interview is available with Raqs Media Collective. 25. De Wachter, n.p. 26. Rhizome, n.p. 27. Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity Delhi’s Media Urbanism (New York: Routledge, 2009). For Sundaram’s charting of Indian media studies, see his introduction and essays in: ———. ed., No Limits: Media Studies from India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013). 28. Rhizome Interview, n.p. 29. Rhizome Interview, n.p. 30. Moinak Biswas, ‘Off Modern: Moinak Biswas in conversation with Raqs Media Collective,’ Humanities Underground, August 2011. 31. Raqs’ interview with Moinak Biswas. 32. The presence of experimental artist filmmaker Kabir Mohanty in the role of Sarmad speaks to the expansion of film beyond the theatrical release towards the gallery. 33. For pioneering scholarship on such attention to material conditions of technology, I have been inspired by the following works: Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 1983). Leo Enticknap, Moving Image Technology: From Zoetrope to Digital (London: Wallflower, 2005). 34. Pillai was introduced to Freccia by Annette Danto, Professor and Chair of the School of Visual Media and Performing Arts, Brooklyn College. Danto had worked on sound for many New York-based films, including Jodie by Pratibha Parmar (Women Make Movies Collective, 1996). Pillai met her when she was working as the Sound Recordist/Designer for

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35.

36.

37.

38.

Manoj Night Shyamalan’s debut film Praying With Anger (1992) and he as her (boom and mic) assistant. I want to draw attention to the presence of international crews in Chennai, then Madras, and the myriad ways in which filmmakers across the globe meet each other and strike up friendships and collaborations. During the mid-1990s, Sony dropped Hi-8 in favour of the emerging DV format, and as a result, the VX-3 was discontinued in September 1995. However, the VX-3 went on to serve as the framework for a line of professional DV cameras, including the DCR-VX1000, DCR-VX9000, and DSR-200. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_CCD-VX3. A similar problem dogged the deployment of the Steadicam in India during the same period. For a detailed study of the arrival of the Steadicam and its use in Indian popular cinema, see my Bombay. (London: BFI Publishing, 2005). Thangam was screened in many film festivals: Official Selection. Input 1996, Echo 1996, Filmmaker/Doc. 1996, Archipelago 1996, Maremma International Doc Festival 1996. It had additional screenings at the Don Bosco Institute of Communication Arts; Kanchanai Film Society’s Festival of Documentary films at Kilpauk, Chennai, March 2000; and Lignite City Film Society at Neyveli, India, June 2013. It was also on the official selection list of The International Tamil Short and Documentary Film Festival at West End in London, October 2001. Thangam was also telecast on both RAI3 and the local Chennai Doordarshan/Tholaikatchi station. The review I refer to is the one written K. Hariharan, The Hindu, 28 April 1996 (Sunday Supplement): 5. In his detailing of cameras used at the film studio Modern Theaters from an archive of photographs, Pillai notes the presence of Debrie and an Eyemo cameras in addition to the then standard Mitchell. Later, Pillai notes the use of the lighter Arriflex cameras in the 1970s onwards. To follow the trail of footnotes reveals Pillai archive assembled through extensive interviews with cinematographers. See Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Madras Studios: Narrative, Genre, and Ideology in Tamil Cinema (New Delhi: Sage, 2015). In a later article, a return to Maruthi Rao’s cinematography as one of poetics: Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, ‘Cinematography and the Poetics of 1950s Tamil Cinema: Maruthi Rao and Visual Style,’ Screen 58.1 (2017): 73–81. I want to add my own research on the Steadicam in Ramgopal Varma and Mani Ratnam’s films to these contributions of technological experiments towards style and poetics:

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Lalitha Gopalan, Bombay (BFI Classics, 2005). 39. I have written about the pre-eminence of Chennai film production technologies in earlier works. On special effects see Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Conclusion: Digital Imaginings in Indian Popular Films,’ in Cinema of Interruptions : Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI, 2002), 179–200. On Prasad Labs and the arrival of Steadicam cameras see Lalitha Gopalan, Bombay (London: BFI Modern Classics, 2005). For an engrossing ethnography of film production of Tamil cinema in the early twenty-first century see Anand Pandian, Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 40. For a review of the film see https://gulfnews.com/entertainment/tri umph-of-seshadris-maiden-venture-1.564955 (accessed August 2020). 41. Conversations with Piyush Shah were conducted over a period of years: 2013–14; 2015–20. 42. We cannot escape the enormous costs of preservation that also turns to digital waste. The misnomer of the Cloud is nothing short of storage elsewhere at enormous costs. Extant storage solutions in Indian film culture include LTO tape (Linear Tape-Open), replacing Sony Magnetic Tapes, which were damaged. At the same time, the rate of obsolescence written into them—for instance LT06 has become LT07 in three years— has filmmakers constantly scrambling to update their previous works. Intermediary negatives are currently stored at one of the processing labs, Film Lab, Mumbai, where their lot is far from secure in this move towards digitization. None of these are inexpensive propositions and do run the risk of losing works permanently. On digital trash see: Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011) Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 43. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘Memories of Cinema: The Kaul-Kaleka connection,’ in Ranbir Kaleka: Moving Image Works, ed. Hemant Sareen (Bielefeld and Berlin: Kerber Verlag, 2018), 80–105. 44. For a thorough reckoning of film and cinema in the age of digital preservation, albeit with a European focus, see Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009). 45. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘Memories of Cinema: The Kaul-Kaleka Connection,’ 96. 46. On the place of television in the history of the moving image, see Siegfried Zielinksi, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes

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in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999). For their continuing engagement with television, see all of Godard’s films as philosophical propositions on the moving image. Additionally, I find the following Canadian filmmakers to be keenly attentive to the interaction between celluloid and televisual image: Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, and Srinivas Krishna. 47. The film received an enthusiastic reception with the press and is well recorded. For a couple of academic essays on LSD, as the film is known to cinephiles, see: Ravi Sundaram, ‘Publicity, Transparency, and the Circulation Engine,’ Current Anthropology 56.12 (2015): 297–305. Anuja Jain, ‘Love Sex Aur Dhoka: A New Morphology of Contemporary Bombay Cinema,’ Screen 58.1 (2017): 98–106. 48. This narrative is culled from several conversations with Ravikiran Ayyagari since 2011. My interest in FTII and Student Diploma films is most evident in: Lalitha Gopalan, ‘The Enchanted Worlds of the FTII Diploma Films,’ Screen 58.1 (2017): 90–97. 49. The trademark tells it all: shutter speed 1/1000 is the highest shutter speed you can achieve with this camera and K refers to the mount. 50. For a sample of his writings, see: K.G. Soman, ‘Image Manipulation with Filters,’ Lensight VI.III (October 1998): 54–60. K.G. Soman, ‘IMAX and OMNIMAX,’ Lensight VIII.II (December 2000): 43–47. 51. In the ongoing casualty of FTII currircular revisions is the excision of a written thesis, an unfortunate subtraction that renders the renowned national school to that of a polytechnic in service of the film industry. 52. Greyscale is a photographic film with a row of sprocket holes formed on each side thereof includes a sensitometric step wedge of different light intensity values exposed along one side of the film, preferably located between the sprocket holes. 53. Babette Mangolte makes a similar point on digital clarity arising from her practice as a cinematographer. See Babette Mangolte, ‘A Matter of Time: Analogue Versus Digital, the Perennial Question of Shifting Technology and its Implications for an Experimental Filmmaker’s Odyssey,’ in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003). 54. Research on Madhusree Dutta’s films and conversations with her began in 2013.

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55. For a select few of writings of Hindu nationalism and media, see: Siddharth Varadarajan, ed., Gujarat, the Making of a Tragedy (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2002). Arvind Rajagopal, Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Narendra Modi and the Power of Television in Gujarat,’ Television & New Media 16.4 (2015): 346–53. 56. For an account of this event, see the bibliography in: Lalitha Gopalan, Bombay. 57. Also see my ‘Bombay, Post December 6 1992: Space and Time of Communalism,’ in World Film Locations: Mumbai, Helio San Miguel, ed. (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2012), 88–105. 58. For an excellent essay on call center films, see Dale Hudson, ‘Undesirable Bodies and Desirable Labor: Documenting the Globalisation and Digitisation of Transnational American Dreams in Indian Call Centers,’ Cinema Journal xlix.1 (2009): 82–102. 59. In one of its vast database exhibitions MOMA, New York, marks this collaboration under the tab Talk to Me that will lead one to Pad.ma’s page. 60. I am grateful to Ashish Rajadhayaskha’s presentations at two conferences that summarized the work of www.cine.ma. The first one was the 100 Years of Indian cinema conference organized by Ira Bhaskar and Ranjani Mazumdar, JNU, January 2013. The second took the form of a workshop with invitations to interact and input annotations at the conference at Jadavpur University, November 2014. 61. Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image,’ e-flux Journal #10, November 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-def ense-of-the-poor-image/. 62. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, ‘Towards a Third Cinema,’ Tricontinental, 1969. Julio Garcia Espinosa, ‘For an Imperfect Cinema,’ in Twenty-five Years of the New Latin American Cinema, ed. Michael Chanan (London: BFI Publishing, 1983), 28–33. Gabriel Teshome, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982). Paul Willemen, ‘Historical Memorandum: Notions of Third Cinema,’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Considering Comparative Film Studies: in Memory of Paul Willemen 14.1 (2013): 94–95. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, Questions of Third Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 1990).

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63. I owe details of the final shutdown to P.R. Sanjai, ‘“Time Out” Shuts All Three Prints Editions Due to Recurring Losses,’ Live Mint, August 5, 2014 (accessed August 2018). 64. See my forthcoming roundtable on experimental practices in India in A Companion to Experimental Film, ed. Federico Windhausen. Forthcoming. 65. K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro, A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India (New Delhi: Thousand Oaks, 2016). 66. For another view of this period, see Asvin Immanuel Devasundaram, India’s New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid (New York: Routledge, 2016). 67. For a splendid theorization of Bollywood, see Amit Rai, Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). On questions of the diaspora, see a pioneering work: Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2004). For the first booklength study of new Bollywood cinema, see Sangita Gopal, Conjugations Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 68. Rosie Thomas, Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (Andhra Pradesh: Orient Black Swan, 2014). 69. Naman Ramachandran, Rajinikanth: The Definitive Biography (New Delhi: Viking, 2012). 70. For a provocative reading of some of these films, see Subhajit Chatterjee, ‘Toward a New Junk Aesthetics?: Narratorial Predicaments in Contemporary Alternatives In/to Bollywood,’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 25.1 (2017): 195–221. 71. Scott Roxborough, ‘Fortissimo Bankruptcy: Indie Film Industry Reacts with Shock and Sadness,’ The Hollywood Reporter, August 19, 2016 (accessed August 24, 2016). Fortisimmo had its share of tragedies in the Asia market with the premature death of Wouter Barendrcht, a cofounder, whose commitment to Asian independent cinemas was well regarded in the region. 72. Patrick Frater, ‘Rescued from bankruptcy: Fortissimo Films set for sales and PR comeback in Berlin,’ Variety, January 28, 2019 (accessed January 28, 2019). 73. Ashim Ahluwalia acknowledges this epistolary exchange with Ranjani Mazumdar in ‘An Interview with Ashim Ahluwalia,’ Bioscope 7.2 (2016): 207–14. 74. Sudarshan Ramani, ‘That Beautiful Treacherous Thing,’ Projectorhead, 29 March 2014 (accessed May 9, 2014). 75. Ramani, ‘That Beautiful Treacherous Thing.’

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76. Milan Hulsing, ‘Ashim Ahluwalia in Conversation: Gutter cinema in contemporary India,’ Wasafari 19.43 (July 2008): 50–52. 77. Hulsing, ‘Ashim Ahluwalia in Conversation,’ 51. 78. Genre bending has been a strong strain in Ashim Ahluwalia’s work. John and Jane (2005) may circulate as a documentary, but he has repeatedly directed us to be aware that he wanted it to evoke 1970s sci-fi films. On this reference see his interview in Bioscope. For a fulsome reading of John and Jane in the context of call centre films, see Dale Hudson, ‘Undesirable Bodies and Desirable Labour: Documenting the Globalisation and Digitisation of Transnational American Dreams in Indian Call Centers,’ Cinema Journal 49.1 (2009): 82–102. 79. Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 80. Warren Buckland, Hollywood Puzzle Films (New York: Routledge, 2014). 81. Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. 82. Ramani, ‘That Beautiful, Treacherous Thing.’ 83. Stephen Saito, ‘Ashim Ahluwalia on keeping the Good Bits for “Miss Lovely,”’ Moveable Fest , June 22, 2014 (accessed June 30, 2014). 84. Arun Rath, ‘“Miss Lovely” Exposes the Underbelly of the Film Industry,’ Radio Interview: NPR, June 21, 2014. 85. Ramani, ‘That Beautiful, Treacherous Thing.’ 86. I am referring here to the landmark anthology that expands on André Bazin’s cryptic slogan, ‘Pour un cinéma pur: défense de l’adaptation.’ Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film, Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev, eds. (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2013). 87. In my personal conversation with Ashim Ahluwalia, we concurred on how filmmakers have deployed censorship regulations through a kind of perverse literalism. On my own reading of censorship regulations, see Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,’ Screen 38.1 (1997): 42–59. 88. A thorough consideration of Ashim Ahluwalia’s film works figures in my forthcoming book Archive to Gallery: Experimental Film and Video Practices in India. A central figure and collaborator in Ahluwalia’s work up to Miss Lovely is his co-producer and filmmaker-artist, Shumona Goel, whose own experimental film I Am Micro (2010) demonstrates an attention to celluloid in the age of the digital by shooting a 35mm film in a shuttered film factory in Kolkata. A rigorous soundtrack that acts as counterpoint to the film has Kamal Swaroop’s commentary on filmmaking as philosophy. These and Goel’s other works are central to my concerns in my forthcoming book. 89. Ashim Ahluwalia’s assistants have made films inspired by his own genre bending practice. Please see Kabir Mehta’s Buddha.mov (2017)

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and Kabir Chowdhury’s Mehsampur (2018). Bernd Lutzeler’s Camera Threat, a German production, offers a dialogue with Miss Lovely through interviews with extras in the medium specific format of 35mm. 90. I feel personally invested in the to-and-fro between the different circuits of practice and taste that race through south Mumbai. Having introduced Ashim Ahluwalia and K.U. Mohanan to the great abstract painter Akbar Padamsee, whose own curiosity about the makers of Miss Lovely, which I insisted he watch, set in motion all kinds of homages and digs into the archive. Ahluwalia was taken up with Padamsee’s experiments with celluloid in the vibrant days of the Vision Exchange workshop that included the lost film Events in the Cloud Chamber. For an interesting account of these exchanges see, Meenakshi Shedde, ‘Art in the River of Life,’ Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, eds. Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2010). My own attempts, with the help of Padamsee’s partner and archivist par excellence, Bhanu Padamsee, to seek a celluloid copy of SZYGXY after a screening at the UNESCO screening in 1969 has been nothing short of a free fall into the bowels of international archives. In any event, the meeting between the artist and filmmakers, collectively enthralled with the medium of celluloid, at Padamsee’s home, had Ahluwalia and Mohanan collaborating on recreating the lost film. The rehearsal of contingency of shooting the processing of film, by acknowledging it as mysterious, was the main hook for Ahluwalia. The finished film took the form of a gallery installation at Jhaveri Contemporary: mixing strands of home movies from the 1970s, with Mohanan’s filming of Padamsee working in his studio after a stroke in 2013. Shot on 35mm, this was yet another self-reflexive strategy to the artist whose own work distances him from figurative painting; this choice to reject dominant trope was celebrated by a younger filmmaker making his own stance against the dominance of any singular way of conveying the luminosity of celluloid. 91. For a review of the anthology film, see Trisha, ‘Kashyap’s “The Last Act” tries to be more than some of its parts,’ First Post, December 15, 2012 (accessed May 27, 2020). 92. Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry’s pioneering essay covers three documentary films that deal with the reckoning of the events of 1984 that include the state-orchestrated military campaign against Sikh separatism termed Operation Bluestar and the assassination of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in October 1984 that unleashed a pogrom against the Sikhs. Working through the term chaurasi that Chaudhry claims, ‘Since then, ’84, called chaurasi in Punjabi/ Hindi, has become a standardized term, denoting the pogrom as a fixed site of memory,’ and the film under consideration offers ways of addressing narratives of trauma. See Ishmeet

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Kaur Chaudhry, ‘Religious Intolerance and Cinematic Representations: A Study of Selected Short-Films on the 1984 anti-Sikh Pogrom in India,’ Indialogs 4 (2017): 63–78. https://www.raco.cat/index.php/ Indialogs/article/view/321229 (accessed February 26, 2020). Additional essays offering diagnostics of the socio-political and cultural situation in Punjab are available in: Marco Corsi, ‘Communalism and the Green Revolution in Punjab,’ Journal of Developing Societies 22.2 (2006): 85–109. Pritam Singh and Navtej K. Purewal, ‘The Resurgence of Bhindranwale’s Image in Contemporary Punjab,’ Contemporary South Asia 21.2 (2013): 133–147. Lars Gustaf Andersson and John Sundholm, ‘Spaces of Becoming: The Stockholm Film Workshop as a Transnational Site of Film Production,’ Transnational Cinemas 6.2 (2015): 156–167. 93. Plucked out of Ahluwalia’s orbit, Mehsampur belongs to a set of Punjabi art cinema whose engagement with duration in cinema is tightly entwined with the trauma of violence engulfing the partition of 1947 and pogrom against the Sikhs in 1984. Gurvinder Singh’s auteur-based films Anhe Ghore ka Daan/Alms for a Blind Horse (2011) and Chauti Khoot/Fourth Direction (2015) offer immersive experiences of the fear and paranoia engulfing this period. A longue durée engagement with partition unfolds differently in two of Anup Singh’s long format works. Ekti Nodir Naam (2002) grapples with the partition of Bengal through the biography of the legendary filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, who was also his teacher at FTII. His second, the feature film Qissa (2013), returns to the long partition of 1947 that begins in 1946. I also want to resurrect his stunning FTII Diploma film, Lasya (1986), that reckons directly with the then recent pogrom against the Sikhs, a film whose commitment to movement in space captures the time of trauma and retains the status of a pioneering work in the Punjabi language art cinema. To these auteurbased works, I want to add an outlier, a novice by all accounts, Ivan Ayr’s Soni (2018) whose mix of Hindi and Punjabi language dialogue captures a Delhi ambience, while its handheld camera aesthetics of the quotidian lives of Sikh police officers draws an uncanny resemblance to contemporary Romanian cinema. For some of the finest writing on Romanian cinema, see: Dominique Nasta, Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle (London: Wallflower Press, 2013). Christina Stojanova, The New Romanian Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

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94. Personal conversations with Pinaki Banerjee, December 2018. 95. See my account of FTII and Student Diploma Films in Lalitha Gopalan, ‘The Enchanted Worlds of the FTII Diploma Films,’ Screen 58.1 (2017): 90–97. 96. For a comprehensive view of film societies in India, see V.K. Cherian, India’s Film Society Movement: The Journey and Its Impact (New Delhi: Sage, 2017). 97. For a well-deserved biopic on P.K. Nair, see Shivendra Dungapur’s Celluloid Man (2012). 98. Kamal relays a story from his FTII days when a classmate of his would spend days flipping through the pages of Les Cahiers du Cinema—the magazine that was loaded with luminaries of the French new wave directors—and returned to the hostel one day frustrated that this magazine had so many spelling errors. He did not know it was published in French. How could Kamal not recall this devotion and misrecognition to the film journalist at Busan! 99. Kamal reminds me that the only independent film in 2012 that managed to reap profits was Faiza Ahmed Khan’s documentary Superman of Malegaon (2012) to a tune five to seven lakh rupees. 100. I have been fortunate to have ongoing conversations with my friend and political theorist, Ritu Vij, on precarity for years. See: Ritu Vij, ‘Affective Fields of Precarity: Gendered Antinomies in Contemporary Japan,’ Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 38.2 (2013): 122–38. ———. ‘The Global Subject of Precarity,’ Globalizations 16.4 (2019): 506–24. Anthropologists have been at the forefront of recording the daily burgeoning inequities that continue to grow in the twenty-first century: the poorest burdened by their work in insecure, ‘flexible,’ ‘gig’ economies versus the rich who have been able to consolidate wealth from these very digital technologies. In the growing literature by sociologists and economists, see: Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). Birte Heidkamp and David Kergel, eds., Precarity Within the Digital Age Media Change and Social Insecurity (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2017). For a manifesto that calls on us to acknowledge the presence of those labouring in these precarious conditions see Precarity Lab, ‘Digital Precarity Manifesto,’ Social Text 37.4 (2019): 77–93.

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101. Martine Beugnet’s splendid essay on watching films on small screens rings through this reading: Martine Beugnet, ‘Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone,’ in Cinematicity in Media History, eds. Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 196– 210. 102. William Brown, Supercinema Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013). 103. The term ‘cruel cinema’ was initially coined in my article: Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Film Culture in Chennai,’ Film Quarterly 62.1 (2008): 40–45. 104. Ira Jaffe, Slow Movies Countering the Cinema of Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) 105. Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 106. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 107. For an elaboration of world cinema, see my essay, Lalitha Gopalan, ‘World Cinema,’ in The Cambridge World History, eds. John McNeil and Kenneth Pomeranz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 249–70. I have been inspired by David Martin-Jones’s continuing commitment to world cinemas as being central to meditations on film philosophy: David Martin-Jones, Deleuze and World Cinemas (London: Continuum 2011). ———. Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History (London: Routledge, 2019). ———. ‘Introduction: Film-Philosophy and a World of Cinemas,’ Film-Philosophy xx.1 (2016): 6–23. 108. For a sustained focus on single films, please browse through the series of monographs in the BFI Classics and Modern Classics Series. 109. For returning me to the poetics of the essay like no other collection in recent times, see Roberto Tejada, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness: History + Metaphor (Blacksburg, Virginia: Noemi Press, Inc., 2019). 110. Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Ayisha Abraham’s Straight 8,’ New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film xi.2–3 (2013): 159–68.

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Gopalan, Lalitha. ‘Avenging Women in Indian Cinema.’ Screen 38.1 (1997): 42–59. ———. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 2002. ———. Bombay. London: BFI Publishing, 2005. ———. ‘Film Culture in Chennai.’ Film Quarterly 62.1 (Fall 2008): 40–45. ———. ‘Bombay, Post December 6 1992: Space and Time of Communalism.’ In World Film Locations: Mumbai, edited by Helio San Miguel, 88–105. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2012. ———. ‘Ayisha Abraham’s Straight 8.’ New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 11.2/3 (2013): 159–68. ———. ‘World Cinema.’ In The Cambridge World History, edited by John McNeil and Kenneth Pomeranz, 249–70. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015. ———. ‘The Enchanted Worlds of the FTII Diploma Films.’ Screen 58.1 (2017): 90–97. ———. ‘Intermedial Circularities in Ranbir Kaleka’s Video Works.’ In Ranbir Kaleka: Moving Image Works, edited by Hemant Sareen, 138–61. Berlin: Kerber Verlag, 2018. ———. ‘Roundtable on Experimental Practices in India.’ In A Companion to Experimental Film, edited by Federico Windhausen. Wiley-Blackwell. Forthcoming. Griffiths, Alison. Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Heidkamp, Birte, and David Kergel, eds. Precarity Within the Digital Age: Media Change and Social Insecurity. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2017. Hudson, Dale. ‘Undesirable Bodies and Desirable Labor: Documenting the Globalization and Digitization of Transnational American Dreams in Indian Call Centers.’ Cinema Journal xlix.1 (2009): 82–102. Hulsing, Milan. ‘Ashim Ahluwalia in Conversation: Gutter Cinema in Contemporary India.’ Wasafari 19.43 (July 2008): 50–52. Hyder, Syed Akbar. ‘Azad, Josh, and the Aesthetics of Love.’ Presentation, Harvard University, n.d. Jaffe, Ira. Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action. London: Wallflower Press, 2014. Jaffrelot, Christophe. ‘Narendra Modi and the Power of Television in Gujarat.’ Television & New Media 16.4 (2015): 346–53. Jain, Anuja. ‘Love Sex Aur Dhoka: A New Morphology of Contemporary Bombay Cinema.’ Screen 58.1 (2017): 98–106. Jayasankar, K.P., and Anjali Monteiro. A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India. New Delhi: Thousand Oaks, 2016.

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Kinder, Marsha, and Tara McPherson. Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Lamarre, Thomas. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Lawder, Standish D. The Cubist Cinema. New York: NYU Press, 1975. Lowenstein, Adam. Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, & the Age of Digital Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Mangolte, Babette. ‘A Matter of Time: Analogue Versus Digital, the Perennial Question of Shifting Technology and its Implications for an Experimental Filmmaker’s Odyssey.’ In Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, edited by Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, 261–74. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003. Manovich, Lev. ‘After Effects or the Velvet Revolution.’ Millennium Film Journal 45–46 (2006): 5–19. ———. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Martin-Jones, David. Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History. London: Routledge, 2019. ———. Deleuze and World Cinemas. London: Continuum, 2011. ———. ‘Introduction: Film-Philosophy and a World of Cinemas.’ Film-Philosophy xx.1 (2016): 6–23. Mazumdar, Ranjani. ‘An Interview with Ashim Ahluwalia.’ Bioscope 7.2 (2016): 207–14. McNeill, Isabelle F. Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Nagib, Lúcia, ‘The Politics of Impurity.’ In Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film, edited by Nagib and Anne Jerslev, 21–40. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. ———. Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Nasta, Dominique. Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press, 2013. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Peth˝ o, Ágnes. Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Pierson, Michele. Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

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Willemen, Paul. ‘Historical Memorandum: Notions of Third Cinema.’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Considering Comparative Film Studies: In Memory of Paul Willemen 14.1 (2013): 94–95. Zielinski, Siegfried. Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History. Translated by Gloria Custance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999.

Filmography 1917 . Directed by Sam Mendes (2019). 7 Islands and a Metro. Directed by Madhusree Dutta (2006). Aaranya Kaandam. Directed by Thiagarajan Kumararaja (2010). Alaipayuthey/ Waves . Directed by Mani Ratnam (2000). Alsino and the Condor. Directed by Miguel Littín (1983). Aks . Directed by Rakesh Omprakash Mehra (2001). Alai Payuthey. Directed by Mani Ratnam (2000). Amores Perros . Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (2002). Anhe Ghore ka Daan. Directed by Gurvinder Singh (2011). Aparajita Tumi. Directed by Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury (2012). Arrival . Directed by Mani Kaul (1980). Ashwatthama. Directed by Pushpendra Singh (2017). Bhoot. Directed by Ram Gopal Varma (2003). Black Friday. Directed by Anurag Kashyap (2004). Bombay. Directed by Mani Ratnam (1995). Bombay’s Blood Yatra. Directed by Suma Josson (1993). Bombay, Our City. Directed by Anand Patwardhan (1985). Brahman Naman. Directed by Qaushik Mukherjee (2016). Buddha.mov. Directed by Kabir Mehta (2017). Bulbul Can Sing . Directed by Rima Das (2018). Camera Threat. Directed by Bernd Lutzeler (2017). Celluloid Man. Directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (2012). Chauthi Koot. Directed by Gurvinder Singh (2015). Chitrabhang . Directed by Nina Sugati (1975). The Color of Pomegranates. Directed by Sergei Parajanov (1969). The Copper River. Directed by Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai (1991). Cosmic Sex. Directed by Amitabh Chakraborty (2012). Cries and Whispers . Directed by Ingmar Bergman (1972). Dil Par Mat Le Yaar. Directed by Hansal Mehta (2000). Divya Drishti. Directed by Sidharth Srinivasan (2002). Don. Directed by Farhan Akhtar (2006). Dubai Return. Directed by Aditya Bhattacharya (2005). Egaro Mile. Directed by Ruchir Joshi (1991).

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Ekti Nodir Naam. Directed by Anup Singh (2002). Events in a Cloud Chamber. Directed by Ashim Ahluwalia (2016). Fried Fish, Chicken Soup, and a Premiere Show. Directed by Mamta Murthy (2012). Gaali Beeja. Directed by Babu Eshwar Prasad (2015). Gandu. Directed by Quashik Mukherjee (2010). Gangs of Wasseypur. Directed by Anurag Kashyap (2012). The Gold-Laden Sheep and the Sacred Mountain. Directed by Ridham Janve (2018). Greater Elephant. Directed by Srinivas Sunderrajan (2012). Gulumaal: The Escape Directed by V.K. Prakash (2009). Guru. Directed by Mani Ratnam (2007). Hey Ram. Directed by Kamal Haasan (2000). I Am Micro. Directed by Shumona Goel and Shai Heredia (2010). I Am Not a Witch. Directed by Rungano Nyoni (2017). I.D. Directed by K.M. Kamal (2012). I Live in Behrampara. Directed by Madhusree Dutta (1993). In the Forest Hangs a Bridge. Directed by Sanjay Kak (1999). In the Shadow of the Cobra. Directed by Ted Nicolaou (2004). Ivan. Directed by Parthiban (2002). Jaane Kya Tune Kahi. Directed by Ravikaran Ayyagari (2011). Janmadinam. Directed by Suma Josson (1998). Jodhaa Akbar. Directed by Ashutosh Gowariker (2008). Jodie. Directed by Pratibha Parmar (1996). John and Jane. Directed by Ashim Ahluwalia (1995). Jonaki. Directed by Aditya Vikram Sengupta (2014). Ju-On: The Grudge. Directed by Takashi Shimizu (2002). Kaal Abirathi. Directed by Amitabh Chakraborty (1989). Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. Directed by Karan Johar (2001). Kahini. Directed by Malay Bhattacharya (1997). Kahaani. Directed by Sujoy Ghosh (2012). Kamlabai. Directed by Reena Mohan (1992). Kattumaram. Directed by Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai (2019). Kaul. Directed by Aadish Vasudev Keluskar (2016). Khosla ka Ghosla. Directed by Dibakar Banerjee (2006). Mitr, my friend. Directed by Revathi (2002). Mudhal Mudhal Mudhal Varai/M3V . Directed by Krishnan Seshadri Gomatam (2009). Mumbai Express . Directed by Singeetam Srinivasa Rao (2005). Lagaan. Directed by Ashutosh Gowariker (2001). Lajwanti. Directed by Pushpendra Singh (2014). Lamerica. Directed by Gianni Amelio (1994).

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The Last Act . Directed by Goswami Anurag et al (2012). Lasya. Directed by Anup Singh (1986). Lens . Directed by Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan (2016). Life is Beautiful. Directed by Roberto Benigni (1997). Lord of the Orphans. Directed by Ranjan Palit (2018). Love’s Labor. Directed by Aditya Vikram Sengupta (2014). LSD: Love Sex Aur Dhoka. Directed by Dibakar Banerjee (2010). Made in India. Directed by Madhusree Dutta (2002). Mangal Pandey: The Rising . Directed by Ketan Mehta (2005). The Master. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (2012). Mehsampur. Directed by Kabir Chowdhury (2018). The Mirror. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1975). Missed Call. Directed by Vinay Subramanian and Mridul Toolsidass (2005). Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night. Directed by Sonali Gulati (2005). Naseem. Directed by Saeed Mirza (1995). Nasir. Directed by Arun Karthick (2020). Oli Vilakku. Directed by Tapi Chanakya (1968). Om Dar-B-Dar. Directed by Kamal Swaroop (1988). On Cannibalism. Directed by Fatimah Rony (1994). Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. Directed by Mansoor Khan (1988). Paanch.. Directed by Anurag Kashyap (2003). Phool Aur Patthar. Directed by O.P. Ralhan (1966). Phoring. Directed by Indranil Roychowdhury (2013). Pickpocket . Directed by Robert Bresson (1959). Pothigai Malai. Directed by Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai and Ilaria Freccia (1995). Praying with Anger. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan (1992). Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost. Directed by Anup Singh (2013). Ravening. Directed by Bhaskar Hazarika (2019). Right Here, Right Now. Directed by Anand Gandhi (2003). Roja. Directed by Mani Ratnam (1992). Sexy Durga. Directed by Sanal Sashidaran (2018). Ship of Theseus . Directed by Anand Gandhi (2012). Siddheshwari. Directed by Mani Kaul (1990). Solaris . Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972). Soni. Directed by Ivan Ayr (2018). Silandhi/ Spider. Directed by Aathiraj (2008). The Spirit of the Beehive. Directed by Victor Erice (1973). The Stolen Children. Directed by Gianni Amelio (1992). Superman of Malegaon. Directed by Faiza Ahmad Kahn (2008). Take Off . Directed by Mahesh Narayanan (2017). Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis. Directed by Anamika Haksar (2018). Tales from Planet Kolkata. Directed by Ruchir Joshi (1993).

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Tangerine. Directed by Sean Baker (2015). The Third Infinity. Directed by Piyush Shah (2018). Thithi. Directed by Raam Reddy (2015). A Tryst with the People of India. Directed by Saeed Mirza (1997). Tumbaad. Directed by Rahi Anil Barye (2018). The Turin Horse. Directed by Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky (2011). The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project . Directed by Srinivas Sunderrajan (2010). Urf Professor. Directed by Pankaj Advani (2001). Village Rockstars . Directed by Rima Das (2017). Voices from Baliapal . Directed by Ranjan Palit and Vasudha Joshi (1988). Woman in the Dunes. Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara (1964).

CHAPTER 2

Minding the Gap

Even if you have heard it but once while riding the London Underground, the directive stays with you: ‘Mind the Gap!’ I have been longing to deploy the phrase at cinema studies conferences, when questions of research at archives arise, to remind my colleagues of economic disparities between cinemas.1 Film archives have long been the privilege of First World nations, their upkeep and protocols the envy of many of us working

First intimations of this section of the essay were discussed with Sita Reddy; on her directive and during her time as programmer at Provisions Library where I first saw Rajkamal Kahlon’s work in Spring 2006. For our times in Washington, D.C., and for our lives after, I dedicate this essay to her. The first section of the essay on Mangal Pandey and found footage has benefitted from presentations at the following conferences and seminars: Cinema South Asia Conference, University of Pennsylvania; The Social and Material Life of Indian Cinema Conference, New York University; Mount Holyoke College; Busan Film Forum, Busan Film Festival, Korea; Cinema of Resistance, Gorakhpur Film Festival, India; One Hundred Years of Indian Cinema Conference, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal University, New Delhi; Conference on Media and Imperialism, International Association of Media and History, Amsterdam; and the Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference, Boston. In the swirl of titles and coincidences, Gina Marchetti pointed out that Bing Liu’s documentary has the same title as this chapter: Minding the Gap (2018). © The Author(s) 2020 L. Gopalan, Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54096-8_2

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on cinemas that have had equally long histories of theatrical releases, yet whose films are rarely stored in archives.2 What a film archive deems worthy of cataloguing and preserving provokes ongoing discussions on its very ontology, which are further animated when considering deteriorating celluloid works.3 The status of a digital feature film archive, in contrast, is a non-starter. My continuing efforts to locate digital films recommended to me, even those with records of film festival circulation and theatrical screenings, have inevitably turned up an array of diverse formats, often arriving as gifts from filmmakers in the form of flash drives, DVDs, digital videos, VHS tapes, YouTube uploads, and, more recently, Vimeo links with protected passwords. Once in possession of these files, I have had to reckon with and account for the less than perfect quality of the image, the compressed files or transferred copies, which have undergone mutation triggers a lament in this cinephile who wails against the loss. Holes in archives stare down at scholars and writers of contemporary Indian cinemas, the assumption that such works will be ubiquitous online an erroneous one. Equally, this gap between the availability of works and scholarship about them has allowed us to counter the presumed claims of plenitude in other cinemas and their attendant theoretical speculations—gaps befall all archives and that too is the medium support of scholarship.4 What theories of moving image can we write of in the face of absent and lost films? That is the sound of my dirge that propelled this book into being. A project of retrieval and restoration, a book on films lost to the vagaries of marketplace rationales in the enterprise of archives and preservation, their loss further exacerbated by the continuing instability and obsolescence of formats across global capitalism. To trace the arrival of the digital feature film in India is to come across various timetables and origins that have us wandering into the fiction of history—the stronghold of historiography.5 It is in this spirit of chance, contingency, and lack that I frame the reading of three films in this chapter. Whatever the status of the digital film works, however compromised their materiality, I cannot help being enthralled by their engagement with the affordances of the digital conveyed in their storytelling.

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Night Show We could begin this story anywhere, but a late-night screening of Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005) seems like a good place to start—or rather— return to. However, a bit of conjuring is in order since the venue I attended, Naga Theatre in Bangalore, is long gone, razed in June 2008, and in its place stands the Lemon Tree Hotel.6 A Ketan Mehta film, a friend and I speculated, would not disappoint us.7 As a bit of background, I should mention that Mehta graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India in 1975, tapping into the art cinema zeitgeist with his film Bhavni Bhavai in 1980. He had by then made a couple of documentaries, a form he returns to frequently, and since his first feature he has experimented with a range of genres from historical dramas, comedies, and more recently a television series called Time Bomb—a remake of the primetime American TV show, 24. That evening, in our cinephiliac world, Mehta was clearly demonstrating his strengths as a director of the strident, social interest documentary while being equally at home with the speed and hustle of the action genre, often packaging it as historical drama, a throwback to his Mirch Masala (1982). But the film I went to see, the purpose of my visit to the night show in 2005, has now slipped away from focus; in its place stands the epitaph of my consuming interest in its long ending. Somewhere along the line my allegiances shifted, from an interest in the film of Mangal Pandey itself, to a particular fascination with only its closing segment. The film’s ending, I returned to, not in a projection hall, but on a digital platform: my computer screen. It is an extraordinary ending that appears to secede from the dramatic enactment preceding it, that narrative too quickly forgotten. The footage looks uncannily familiar to that of another film: the opening segment of Sudhir Mishra’s Haazaron Kwashein Mein/A Thousand desires like this one (2003) that I had seen earlier at the Washington D. C. Film Festival in 2005. But some differences emerge: where Mangal Pandey closes with recycled footage, Haazaron opens with it. Mishra’s film opens with the camera rotating over shots of the headlines of the Indian Express newspaper, dated August 15, 1947, and cuts through a fade-out to Nehru delivering his well-known speech ‘A tryst with destiny’ to the nation, newly born at midnight the night before. In the logic of reaction shots, the film cuts from Nehru addressing from his podium to a group shot of leaders and politicians. Through a series of transition shots consisting of two additional newspaper headlines on the same date—the

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English language paper Times of India and the Hindi paper Hindustan— the film cuts to a series of shots at the Red Fort in New Delhi clearly captured during the day on August 16, 1947. Initiated by the image of the Indian flag fluttering, the film cuts to a high angle shot of crowds milling in the area below. The two separate images of the flag and crowds are united in the following image, where the camera captures the flag casting a shadow over the crowds, shoring up an arresting and iconic image of a people under one flag. This sequence of images closes with one of the high angle shots of milling crowds, now on second viewing, which surfaces as the new citizenry of independent India. Despite the different kinds of images on-screen, Nehru’s voice on the soundtrack harnesses the various shots together, linking the political leaders inside the parliament to the crowds outside, tying together archival images of the newspapers, both in English and Hindi, as well as the crowds at the Red Fort under the flag— forcing a continuity that I suspect was absent in the found footage. While considered separately, akin to the still photographs announced in newspapers, each image bursts with iconic signification; they are spliced together in a sequence whereby constant movement within and between the frames ensures the viewer, years later, an indexical signification and a recording of the pro-filmic. The movement from images of newspapers, statesmen, flags, and crowds offers us a linear sequence from an arrangement of random images that produce simultaneously the rhetoric of the documentary and the nation. Whether Mishra had directly inserted this deliberate sequence of images, procured from the Films Division in Mumbai, or whether he had strung together images, soundtrack, topicals, and actualities at random— film fragments—is still under investigation. Nevertheless, the opening sequence aspires towards a documentary mode of presentation that the film distances itself from.8 If we recall, it is Nehru’s voice and speech of promises that the film engages with, stating this position explicitly in the statement that scrolls on-screen, but I want to suggest that the film’s narrative of disappointment remains a feature of its plot rather than its representation. The film periodically resorts to shots of groups of peasants and leaders (even if the flag is absent), and the sequencing of images does not present a new order but a style that is familiar from political dramas from the canon of global cinemas. In the end, it is the opening segment, and Mishra’s film attempt to induce an archive of earlier images of August

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1947 that lingers, reminding us of the wealth of film footage and varieties of sequencing that are surprisingly available in even the most common film at the multiplex. Returning to Mehta’s Mangal Pandey allows for a specificity to emerge on the relationship between the black and white ending footage and the preceding narrative. The severance from the colour dramatization finds prompting through a dissolve that ties images of a blazing cantonment building to a series of engravings and, shortly thereafter, another dissolve yields the black and white film footage.9 Collating strips of actualities, the second series, is unremarkably familiar, reminding me of images that have long circulated as still photographs, film footage, and television programmes at crucial moments in nationalist pedagogy: August 15, Independence Day; January 26, Republic Day; and, for some years, Gandhi and Nehru’s birthdays, October 2 and November 14, respectively. Additionally, it reverses an anterior theatrical convention of showing actualities as black and white newsreel footage before the main feature film, an overture in theatrical screenings that was dispensed with altogether by theatre owners by 1996.10 While harking back to a period of watching topicals before the main feature, with the masculine voice-over pronouncing gravitas (in this film relayed by the actor Om Puri’s gravelly voice), its arrangement at the end of a colour extravaganza is unusual enough to grab my attention. The attendant anachronism emerging from his voice heard over this footage is an additional provocation for closer scrutiny. As my reproach expands towards the main narrative that night at the onset of sounds of shuffling feet out of the screening space, perambulating vehicles in the driveway that serves as the perimeter to Naga Theatre, brightening lights and loud chatter emitting from my fellow viewers, so does my interest in the finale heightens. I subsequently subjected it to further scrutiny at my desk, propelled by ‘archive fever,’ poaching from Jacques Derrida.11 The exercise yielded vastly different texts for consideration, and a straightforward listing produces the following queue of images: Gandhi leading a rally; city streets clogged with marches; colonial police clubbing protestors; a group portrait of children; shots of the Red Fort on August 16, 1947, with overhead shots of crowds; the lowering of the Union Jack and Prime Minister Nehru hoisting the Indian flag in its place. The sequencing impresses upon the viewer the birth of a new citizenry under a new flag; the camera is positioned well above the flag post; fittingly, in this upbeat narrative of a

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nation’s independence, the sequence of images closes with the Indian flag fluttering. Neither the systematic ways in which I approached this inventory of images on my computer screen, nor the impression of familiarity that I had with the footage, were able to stand up to the sensation of being swept away by the span of this last fluttering flag. More accurately, the slow movement of the shadow of the flag sweeping across the crowds had me enthralled for a long time. There is a relay of adulation at play here: Mehta’s film showers these black and white film images with considerable attention by framing them with a black border, almost squaring the aspect ratios. In effect this mesmerizes me in a way that outweighs my detachment from the over two-hour-long production extravaganza. This editing strategy of introducing a different set of images at the end highlights the director’s impression on the film. It recalls the images of nuclear testing at the end of Mehta’s debut feature Bhavni Bhavai (1980), a supplement that expels the claustrophobia of the mise en scène wracked with feudal relationships by propelling the film towards nuclear detonation in the desert. Summoning the former oeuvre of an art house film director in this case is an overreach, given the box office success of this commercial film, but admittedly it is hard to forsake style for a film school trained auteur, even if they are consigned to mere twitches at the very last instance. An attempt to temper my own attachment to these images through attentive research includes a correspondence with Mehta, who disclosed that he had procured the images, both film footage and animation, from Films Division for a sum of 20,000 rupees; closing credits additionally acknowledge the Gandhi Film Foundation. But such details of attribution and acquisition were insufficient to locate the provenance of these images despite my further research on these actualities at Films Division, Mumbai. As the research for the particulars revealed, the recycled footage at the end of Mangal Pandey was neither available as ready-made nor as discrete actualities at the makeshift collection at the Films Division library, rather, they were culled from four separate films that were part of an omnibus series India Wins Freedom produced by N.S. Thapa, one of the acclaimed former directors of the Film Division of India, between 1984 and 1985. To list the sources across various films reveals the work of the assistant who compiled these for Mehta: from India Independent (1968) and India Wins Freedom (1985) images of constituent assembly and flags; Do or Die (1985), the sources for the rallies and marches; and

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Netaji (1973), culled from Indian News Parade, bears images of clubbing. The four separate films, in turn, were assembled by Thapa’s office from forty to fifty actualities produced from various sources, including British Movietone and Indian News Parade from the pre-independence period. In short, the omnibus falls in the genre of the compilation film.12 Ascertaining the provenance of the recycled footage as being extracted from four separate documentary films offers only a provisional answer to the origin of these images, whose ubiquity blocks, rather than illuminates, the gaps in the vast collection commandeered by the institution of Films Division. To direct prospective procurers to Thapa’s omnibus, as Mehta’s response suggests, smacks of efficiency, but it equally conceals a breach in the collection of actualities, particularly from the 1940s that, when detected, begs a recounting of institutional history with a tortured relationship to the idea of the nation state archive as a comprehensive repository for all films.13 The primary source of documentary film production in India for years has been the Films Division, established by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in December 1947 and serves as a storage house for films produced. Films Division was closely modelled on a number of colonial-era documentary units such as the Film Advisory Board (FAB) that functioned between 1940 and 1946, and the Information Films of India (IFI) and Indian News Parade that existed between February 1943 and 1946. According to Jag Mohan, one of the earliest historians of the documentary movement in India, the FAB and IFI produced over 170 films between 1940 and 1946 to support the British war effort.14 However, since the film units were closely associated with the colonial state’s propaganda machine, their activities were shut down by anticolonial nationalists. The downside of this lockdown on film units of the Department of Information and Broadcasting was an embargo on the official production of documentaries, starting at the end of 1945 and until the establishment of Films Division in December 1947, which actually started functioning fully in November 1948. Among the events that may have fallen under the purview of these official units would have included the handover and the events leading up to August 15 and 16, 1947, a fact that is not lost in the official narratives of the Film Division. The various anti-colonial rallies, strikes, and marches that characterized 1940s India, were surely photogenic, even if the colonial film unit, IFI, could not record them. The fragments of actualities recording these demonstrations that appear in the closing sequence of Mangal

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Pandey were most probably obtained from other international film units. However, tracking down and viewing actualities produced and distributed by American outfits, such as News of the Day, Movietone News, Paramount News, RKO Pathe News, Hearst Metrotone, Loews International, and Universal Newsreel, does not match the images or their sequencing obtained in Mangal Pandey, especially the ones detailing the events of August 15 and 16, 1947.15 In the American units, the cameras focus on, and are positioned among, crowds in New Delhi and often a cut ushers us to Karachi to record the inauguration of Pakistan. The Universal Newsreel finds its way into the Constituent Assembly for Nehru’s address at midnight, but on the morning after, the camera stays with the crowds milling outside Parliament House, New Delhi. Tempting as it is to read a map of geopolitical interests in the post-war era leading from these inaugural moments, I want to stay attached to the absence of the top angle shots in collections residing in both the U.S. and Britain. Not securing a correspondence for the images depicting the transfer of power or hoisting of the Indian flag in either American, and subsequently in British, archives stalls the question of provenance. As is often the case, cataloguing of actualities as distinct events at film archives and libraries emerges as a series of approximations in compositions that we can assign to a range of events and different film units. Gandhi’s marches and strikes in 1942 and Nehru’s address to the Constituent Assembly were widely photographed and recur with various adjustments in the position of the camera, and so do the events of August 16, 1947, including even a top angle still shot by Homai Vyarawalla found in the collections at the Alkazi Foundation in New York. But the shadow cast by the flag seems to belong exclusively to Thapa’s compilation film. Notwithstanding the twists and turns of research, seeking provenance begets the query of authorship: who is the cinematographer that shot this footage? Having put aside the technique of cataloguing adopted by the archive, which has been rendered wanting on questions of attribution, my quest for the cameraperson who shot the shadows of a flag is haunted by Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses Gaze (1995) in which the protagonist, A, journeys from Greece to Yugoslavia to view footage shot by the Mannaki’s brothers, Yannaki and Milton, filmmakers who made the first celluloid images of the Balkans. These are the images that A wages hold the key to the explosive political crisis in the name of ethnic nationalism that engulfed the former Balkans in the 1990s. Though no such portent

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provoked my initial exploration, there is little doubt there are homologies to the harrowing partition of the subcontinent along communal lines, the prolonged antagonisms between India and Pakistan over the status of Kashmir, and a second permanent partition with the formation of Bangladesh in 1971. Under the influence of Angelopoulos’s journey film, I must confess to wishing to mount a similar fiction that reimagines the iconography of actualities and documentary works, rather than settling on instrumental endeavours, which I venture find their potential in this avowed foundational moment for the Indian nation on the morning of August 16, 1947. Echoing a similar attachment to the recording of such momentous landmarks in the formation of the new nation-state preoccupies Jag Mohan’s biography of the filmmaker Dr. P.V. Pathy was written from the advantage of helming Films Division for the first two decades, which allowed for an intimate portrait of a preeminent filmmaker in the annals of the institution.16 Jag Mohan’s biography of Pathy is cloaked with inexactitude on matters of composition of these images, while being expansive about the prowess of a preeminent documentary filmmaker who worked both as a freelancer and filmmaker at Films Division and, for our purposes here, allegedly one of two Indian cameramen to record the events of August 15 and 16, 1947. Pathy was on an assignment for Ved Prakash of Film Lasiks Delhi and along with Ambalal Patel recorded the events of August 15, 1947; events on the morning of August 16 are less specific. Mohan adds that during the week of independence, three films made by independents were screened and one was ‘a compilation film entitled 15 August 1947 jointly made by Bombay Talkies and Film Classics of Madras,’ an outfit run under the partnership of Pathy and his brother. Although Mohan’s account encourages us to conclude, provisionally, that Pathy and Patel are the ones to have filmed the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, another inflection emerges in Pathy’s own writings assembled in Mohan’s book, which underplays his role by narrating in third person the lack of a conscripted film unit: ‘One of the sad consequences of this was the fact that at the time our first Independence Day was celebrated there was no official film unit to cover this great event. It is true that a united band of technicians from Bombay did their utmost to record the celebrations.’17 The privation of a wholesale celebration of his presence at the Red Fort, August 16, may suggest Pathy’s modesty or absence from the events. Alternatively, both Mohan and Pathy’s prose eschews style in favour of bureaucratic clarity to the extent that it is

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impossible to distinguish any difference between them, an impression that also inflects actualities: a genre that negates distinctive style. Researching actualities labelled as newsreel footage rarely remarks on the cinematographers’ identity, the filming unit is the official author, a practice that Films Division too adopts. It follows that despite Films Divisions’ seemingly infinite desire to organize and catalogue those of its archives that are available for online streaming, the actualities offer no details of a designated cameraperson—the presumed author; neither a film unit nor an intrepid cinematographer has laid claims on this footage since then. What is worth noting is how an actuality without provenance has moved to the centre of the official archives, repeatedly obtained for its contract with the duration of an event. What is evident in Thapa’s omnibus compilation of films that Mangal Pandey deploys, is that the clipped pace of editing of images secures indexical signification, nevertheless the moving images beckon my attention again and again, exceeding their long fulfilment to the duration of the event.18 Here, I am not referring to the shots of the lowering of the Union Jack and the initial hoisting of the Indian flag shot from below, a camera positioned among the crowds but, to two high angle shots, images captured from the turrets of the Red Fort. In the final edited form, these images are incorporated in a top and bottom rhythm separated from other images: the first one precedes the lowering and hoisting of flag, the second one after Nehru hoists the Indian flag. There is a slight difference in the position of the camera; the second position shifts to the right of the first one, a vastly improved vantage point that in hindsight casts the previous location of the camera as a rehearsal. Coming on the heels of the Indian flag being hoisted, and another shot of it swaying from the crowds below, the second shot from the turrets is the one worthy of my adulation: a shadow of the flag cast large over the crowds, fluttering ever so slightly. Relaying Victor Stoichita’s formulation to reconsider the figuration of shadows, particularly their potential for optical illusions, invites a revisit of the events between the light on the hoisted flag and its shadow cast across the crowd: ‘In terms of pictorial representation, we could say that only a history of chiaroscuro has any chance of success.’19 In its distance from mimesis, the shadows return us to the image qua image, rather than directing us to the event, thus opening a range of possibilities of reading them, including being gripped by their photogenic potential. Among the questions that the shadow of the fluttering flag provokes is the shape of

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independence that is promised in the speech-act event of hoisting of the Indian flag, and I want to suggest that the image deserves our patience in reading rather than rushing through the thematic of an actuality. In the absence of accounts of the climb to the turrets, an action worthy of embellishment in various institutional and individual biographies and their surprising absence, this film footage, I suggest, in its singularity, circulates as a gift to us from the intrepid cinematographer whose acuity forged an alliance between skill and chance. It is only fitting that the poignancy of the gift across the passage of time is heightened by the anonymity shrouding the cinematographer whose distinctive style is for us to decipher.20 Reification of these filmed images is not the only gesture towards a reckoning of time at the end of Mangal Pandey; the film seems to suggest that the sequential ordering of images was already anticipated by conventions of engravings that precede the filmic images, nine to be exact. Reanimated through the movement of the camera and use of dissolves, the engravings absorb intimations of cinematic sequencing, including a high angle shot to survey a scene of a cavalry offence, a close-up of a hand-to-hand combat set against the backdrop of an intense battle, and so on. These engravings belong to various genres of illustration in vogue in the nineteenth century and deployed by British artists in London with the consolidation of the empire in India. Narayani Gupta notes that the definitive moment for this voluminous interest in India, including the crown’s own, was provoked by the first war of independence, the mutiny, and its remounting in Mangal Pandey.21 Queen Victoria ‘sent Egron Lundgren, a Swedish artist whose portraits had made him popular in Britain, to India to record battle sites and depict the army in action.’ There were others artists illustrating the various events of the mutiny: Charles Ball’s detailed drawings were compiled in his History of Indian Mutiny; William Simpson’s watercolours equalled the success of his depictions of the Crimean War. There were photographers who turned battle ruins in Delhi, Lucknow, and Kanpur into picturesque, and at times melancholic, images; Felice Beato’s images, for instance (others photographers include Thomas Rust, Charles Shepherd, John Murray, and Harriet and Major Robert Tytler), stand as witnesses to the ruins in the aftermath of the mutiny. At home in London, according to Gupta, ‘a panorama was exhibited in 1858 at the Gallery of Leicester Square, illustrating the “terrific encounters between the British troops and the mutineers.”’22 What is evident from Gupta’s mapping of the various conventions of

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‘pictorializing the mutiny’ is the profound lack of photographs that directly recorded the various battles. Commissioned artists, engravers, and watercolourists relied on and often embellished standard conventions of representations of battle action while adding a measure of local colour provided by the post facto photographs of battle sites. Celebrating the spectacle of British military engagements in the subcontinent, however, predates 1857. According to Allison Griffiths in the archaeology of illustrations, nineteenth-century battle panoramas were widely popular as a form of presenting subjects in western metropoles of Paris and London with subjects of topical interest drawn from different parts of the world. One of the earliest was The Storming of the Seringapatnam, a 270-degree panorama painted by Robert Ker Porter in 1801 (painted in six weeks to exploit its topical interest).23 Griffiths persuasively suggests that the panoramas, in their ability to project grandness and monumentality, offered their visitors an opportunity for virtual travel that would be more completely realized by cinema at the end of the century.24 The placement of similar illustrations in Mangal Pandey after the dramatization in colour and before the found film footage reignites their spellbinding effects, initially tied to receptions in books and panoramas, is clearly visible in the high angle shots of advancing cavalry and the scenes of detailed actions of sword play and gunfighting that would subsequently inflect the style of global action film genres. But here the illustrations do not simply fill the frame, rather the camera glides over the images, at times moving in for a close-up and at other moments pulling back to exalt in the spectacle; additionally, the separate action-packed engravings are tied together in a series of dissolves highlighting the work of another medium, the cinematic apparatus, a device that we can read as marking the images with an impression of the present. Not unlike Allison Griffiths’ reading of panoramas as being proto-cinematic, Mangal Pandey too, in its closing moments, sketches continuity between the engravings and celluloid, between the spectators of the original engravings in panoramas and current viewers of films, thus encouraging us to explore proto-cinematic moments in different locations, a path of inquiry that is now well underway.25 There are limits, however, to this continuity marking the birth of cinema in a longer history of visual practices, limits largely set by the archives and admittedly oblivious in the Films Division’s animated film 1875, The Beginning (1985), from which these images were procured

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by Mehta. In the able hands of the in-house Animation Unit, trained by Disney’s Claire Weeks, these illustrations, most probably culled from middle-brow British illustrated books, are subject to rudimentary techniques of the animatic camera that instils and simulates movement through recomposition, by closing in on particular details and subsequently pulling back focus: zoom into the person about to be executed followed by pulling back on the same drawing to stage details of the mise en scène, or the revelation of a scroll of the empire in Victoria’s hands, a small detail in a large portraiture.26 The irony should not be lost on us that the engravings deployed in the film celebrate the bravado of the British soldiers as they exercised their might over a rebellious and mutinous population, despite the effect to the contrary that animation techniques allow for by reconfiguring and instilling movement in favour of Indians.27 The different formats constituting the ending of Mangal Pandey draws up close the shape of movement that cinematic sequencing accomplishes—at times—superimposing different frames for a stretch of length, which we recognize as the dissolve, deployed here as movement from animation of illustrations to film footage. Figuring as enjambment, the dissolve assuages differences in form and execution that I have insisted upon; reconfiguration preferred over direct quotations. Arranged sequentially and overlapping—both film footage and animation subjected to digitization as available in editing—the dissolve throws a sheath over differing mediums, thus embalming temporalities specific to each source material. For instance, the medium specificity of the illustrations barely discernible in animation are no longer visible; differences between aquatints or lithographs are rendered irrelevant. Conversely, the hand-cranked shot, most probably recorded at the rate of 16 to 20 frames per second with a news camera, has the effect of Gandhi and protestors marching in jerky motions, revealing the thrust of transitioning towards standardization of exhibition at 24 frames per second, and equally a failure to calibrate the difference during projection when confronting other shooting frames prevalent during the transition. Mehta’s attachment to this archival footage with errors of technical transmission retained in the era of digital signals, pierces our collective national memory of never having seen Gandhi and the marchers walk at normal speed; similar footage is tacked on in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982). The difference in the absorption of the archival footage in the two films is the difference in technology. Digital editing was a distinct possibility that was

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available for Mangal Pandey, as Mehta’s own Maya F/X could have been retrofitted and perhaps, for the first time, we could have seen the actuality of Gandhi’s walk—at the prevailing projection speed of 24 frames per second since standardization—deemed normal. Rather than rounding off the discussion to Mehta’s lack of attunement, I want to return to Godard’s declaration in Le Petit Soldat (1963): ‘Film is truth at 24 frames per second, and every cut is a lie.’ With his characteristic bravura that can hold two contradictory impulses in one utterance, its dialectics alive, despite running the risk of sounding contrarian, Godard delivers a short history of the standardization of frame rate and the vast depths of illusionism that permit swings from truth to lie. Nevertheless, there is the suggestion of the presumptuousness of the 24 frames per second as the standard bearer in Godard’s declaration rather than one that was achieved through dominance and industry patents, foreclosing other possibilities. Rather than considering editing as lying, I imagine ‘truth and lie at 24 frames per second.’28 Tampering with frame rates is the purview of structuralist filmmaking, intentional or accidental.29 Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964– 66), portrait films of pals who are also celebrities, endows the face with sustained attention: mugshots redone.30 Shot at the industry standard speed, Warhol’s instructions were reserved for projection, his proclivity for mining the performance of the projectionist—16 frames per second. Homay King notes an out-of-focus effect, which is a credible sighting of detail except that it is not of one lensing during the shoot but a slower frame rate unspooling during projection, a slow motion effect of a projection trick. Gauzy, blurred, and slow, the portraits ooze a dreamy haze that loops right into Warhol’s engagement with cult of celebrity in several of his works, screen prints most prominently.31 In its current digital version, inaugurated at MOMA, the directives on projection speed are abided by thus restoring ‘a cult of remembrance’—Walter Benjamin’s meditations on photography echo in the age of digital.32 With vastly different effect, it has now come to be that Gandhi’s march with his fellow freedom fighters in the early 1930s will be entombed with jitteriness into perpetuity, mimesis slipping out of the frame, leaving it up to the viewer to accommodate and calibrate, to suture and compensate for the lack of documentation in the run-up to independence, a loss that cloaks me with despair despite my endeavours with the forensics of archival research and my immersion in fieldwork.33 That there are slim pickings in the archives of moving image to index the end of colonialism is

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apparent. Piecing together photographs, heading towards independence and after, has long been an option that has acknowledged the distinctiveness of Homai Vyarawalla, a photographer whose adventures cast her as proto-feminist.34 Yet, the non-synchronicity of film’s frame rate and projection speed, an easy technical fix, reveals a film’s attachment to an effect of anteriority embedded in these actualities: a time before industry standardization or an unbridgeable gap between shooting frame rates and projection speed, characteristic of impoverished archiving techniques. With all the caveats of material conditions and the lack thereof, I cannot shake off my own rehabilitation of these fragments of footage by wresting them away from a hurried indexical signification towards considering the grandeur of their iconography.35 A moodiness swells up in me, in writing this book, that finds a framing in Michael Ann Holly’s rehabilitation of melancholia as an attribute that infuses writing in art history36 : There is no ‘end’ to art history. We simply cannot let these lonely works of art disappear: if this is ‘pathological,’ so be it: if it is symptomatic of melancholy rather than mourning, it is nevertheless the only ‘romantic,’ reparative act in which caretakers can engage, thereby ‘soothing the sadness of our condition,’ as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel puts it.

Holly’s identification of melancholia as the force in the writing of lost objects—to that I shall add deteriorating objects—that in the process are enlivened offers a riposte to the swagger that we, as scholars of other cinemas, have long endured when watching the archival turn in EuroAmerican cinema studies whose vast paper and film archives have never had to consider the precariousness of the archives in and of themselves. Buildings, catalogues, editions, viewing consoles, and staff form an enviable ensemble at the BFI, National Archives in Washington, D.C., UCLA, Amsterdam, Taipei, and so on. The easy passage through such collections has brought to our attention a wide range of films and styles, the effect is one of excess and a cornucopia of wealth, rather than one of loss— an archive besieged by destruction, as fictionalized in Ulysses’ Gaze—or facing loss. In this sense of loss, I keep company with Janet Harbord’s moving reading of Giorgio Agamben’s engagement with cinema37 :

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Modern works of art are fragments from birth, writes Agamben in Stanzas (1977), by which token we can read film (artwork of the 20th century par excellence) as always already a ruin. It is important to maintain the understanding all film is already a ruin, a fragment that is built around but never exhausted in potentiality, open to reconfiguration merely in its reprojection.

To return to the film, enveloped in melancholia, is to be enveloped in this reflective filter of the range of strategies deployed with archival footage and the caesura effect emphasized by the resort to black and white in Mangal Pandey. I am encouraged to consider the ending as a separate film, in other words, a double feature (Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life quotes Opus 161 [1965–66] in its entirety; Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill [2003] has an entire animation embedded in it) whose authorship is attributed to Ketan Mehta. But the work of procuring and sequencing may have been assigned to an assistant director or editor. In this additional accent on attribution I am encouraged to imagine a complicity between the anonymous cinematographer and an unacknowledged assistant in a script in which I play the interloper.38 This reading serves as an epitaph to routine film work that dares to propose style. To return, again, to the final queueing of images culled from Film Division’s archives confirms the final sentence in Thomas Elsaesser’s pioneering evaluation of the scope of the digital, polemically set up against theories of convergence, that deserves a revisit: ‘The digital in this view is not a new medium but rather – for here and now, for the time being, for film and television – first and foremost a new medium for knowing (more) about all media.’39 Provocatively stating ‘that the digital has come to function less as a technology than as a cultural metaphor’ of crisis and transition has a global reach that the very figure of that metaphor has long harboured, a stand-in for anywhere, resonates with an equally wide schematic ‘of Digital India,’ part of the title that this book pronounces. To write in response to Elsaesser’s recognition of Hollywood’s efficient model of narrative cinema is to recognize and note variations in other equally dominant national cinema cultures as well, updating what used to be postcolonial reframing of global pronouncements. To note, the bombastic pyrotechnics used elsewhere in sections of Mangal Pandey fortify Ketan Mehta’s special effects company, Maya Effects, which joins the burgeoning digital effects industry that for now flourishes in Mumbai, Chennai, and Hyderabad and services a global clientele—as evident in

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the closing credits of many a Hollywood movie. An early intimation of the aesthetics of such digital effects in narrative cinema was noted in the closing chapter of my book Cinema of Interruptions and a global sweep of a similar period elaborated in Sean Cubitt’s Cinema Effects that brings into its orbit the black wire stunts and digital effects deployed in the Hindi film Mission Kashmir (2000).40 That digital singularly signals the special effects of large-scale production already seem dated as we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, where feature films have absorbed digital innovations (digital cameras, digital editing programmes, digital data storage, digital projections, digital effects, digital sound, and so on) from production to post-production; recourse to analogue is more deliberate. Independent cinemas, minor cinemas, in many instances from unlikely places, abound and uphold the idea that varied economics of production have undermined extant production conditions in favour of smaller films. In tandem, the steady demise of single-theatre screenings in favour of multiplexes in malls confirms Amit Rai’s conceptualization of mediascape as a framing device for such narratives in the wingspan of theatres in shopping malls. Scholarship on multiplexes in India has echoed the predictions of trade press that smaller productions and shorter films have finally found a niche at such venues.41 Given the breathtaking encompassment of what the digital is along different disciplinary persuasions, a recursive narrative returns me again to the closing segment to emphasize its implicit curatorial impulse, however accidental or routine its claims are. What is worth forwarding is that, as much as digital has spawned a runaway cinephilia that moves from one platform to another—projection to streaming—and more often than not one screen to another—mobile phone to tablet, desktop to laptop— with promiscuity promised by the ease of switching, a distinctiveness in taste moulds, which appears as proto-curatorial, both implicit and explicit. Given the limitless nature of digital archives, where allegedly no title lives in anonymity, the avidness of searches online propels links that are self-generated or identified by search engines’ algorithms; this prods a cinephile’s eccentricities to seek superior formats and hunt down hardto-see films, often lost in celluloid yet reappearing on YouTube with impunity. Such searches require nothing short of the acumen needed in curating, and paradoxically, the encounter with gaps in the vast online moving image archive updates the culture of cult films in the age of digital.

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For such new attachments to narrative features, a detour through the culture of film festivals offers a preview of these one-off releases that rarely assure theatrical distribution, demanding the caveat of a certificate from the Board of Censors; in short, films that have not met ‘clearance’ turn out to be festival films. One such inaugural moment is claimed by familiar arrangements between conglomerates in the age of global capitalism: formation of Digital Talkies in October 2000, with an eye towards ITC Digital Talkies International Film Festival held at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi in March 2001.42 The heady rush into the new millennium was aided by the Y2K snag whose rectification on various platforms led to a wholesale recruitment of technicians from India.

Urf Professor (2001) At a much smaller scale, the first digital film festival in India, alongside an international line-up of digital films, pronounced the premiere of Pankaj Advani’s Urf Professor (2001), the first digital feature produced by Shekhar Kapur’s Digital Talkies. Shot on a Sony DSR 500 over thirteen days with a budget of thirteen lakh rupees, the digital film bore all the paradoxes in nomenclature that remarked on one medium’s death with an afterlife for narrative features in another. Inspired by an avowed Dogma style, guerrilla mode of production, the film was assembled over a six-week stretch of editing, subverting the current norm of lengthy postproduction that digital narrative cinema relies on, a database cinema that is assembled through RAM downloads and backups. My interviews with Radhika Reddy, co-producer and costume designer, and Chirantan Das, cinematographer on the film, recall the late Advani’s insistence on ‘tight scripts’ and his reliance on a stable of actors who had worked with him on short films for Channel V that arrived in the newly opened cable television market in the first decade of the digital millennium.43 Classified under the name ‘Bheja Fry,’ Advani commissioned short films ranging from five to ten minutes while working on his own short works that climbed up to thirty minutes over thirteen episodes. Functioning as a laboratory and proto-independent studio, the roster of short films launched the careers of many in what came to be seen as the independent industry. Originally a painter, Advani’s own migration to television films was through art school, specializing in editing from FTII and excelling with a short film, Sunday (1993), produced by the Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI).

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All of these biographical details (and none of them in particular) prepares one for a viewing of Urf Professor, whose theatrical fate in India was sealed by an embargo from the Board of Censors from its initial screening at the Digital Film Festival. Reddy narrates a secret screening that took place off-site at the British Council, which officially falls outside the purview of Indian theatrical supervision. Without a theatrical release, the ‘banned film’ has since circulated as contraband; low definition digital has more than once become low resolution, rife with damaged areas and pixilation when saved on DVDs or pen drives for in-home viewing. A run on the online site, Passion for Cinema, allowed a low-resolution allure to persist till the site itself went under with the changing fortunes of such cult-based cinephile sites. Years later, with legitimacy of curatorship and the proliferation of film festivals, it was programmed at MAMI by Avijit Mukul Kishore in 2015; persisting beyond the scriptures of exhibition regulations, Kishore deservedly delivered Urf Professor as a cult film.44 Still unavailable in its complete form, either on YouTube or on paid sites, and notwithstanding the fragile versions now available as backups of several generations of transfers that have to contend with changing digital backup technology perpetually on the verge of obsolescence, Urf Professor cannot shake off its enduring appeal of witty banter and obvious black humour, while offering an intense expression of digital image making, that has us in its thrall. The gambit with narrative form sets the opening of the film, which includes risqué dialogue between a newly wed couple. The film opens with the groom seated alone, and a handheld camera records his walk leftwards. In seconds, the frame switches to a red dot of a video-recording button on-screen with options for various aspect ratios for degrees of distances, which leads us towards the bride in wedding red seated on a flower-bedecked bed with the camera trained on her. With a videocam holder swinging closer, we hear the voice-over of the husband, whose confession of past conquests of love and sex sets the narrative, the overt reason for its status as a banned film. When it is time to swap confidences, the bride’s story upstages the groom’s sentimental accounts with ribald details of sex with several men and salacious details of sex talk as a setup of wedding night sequences in popular cinemas. The digital effects to simulate videocam aesthetics offers a keen eye on the mediascape of the period and thereafter that spares no event from being recorded, always available for rewinding, pausing, and forwarding in subsequent viewing on video monitors. Embellishing the digital image proposes degrees

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of self-reflexivity that hints at the near-obsolescence of one format, as suggested by Marshall McLuhan in his pioneering conceptualization of media ecology, and its inverse that he did not anticipate: the possibilities that are far from being exhausted in each distinctive format and its continuing relationship to others (Fig. 2.1).45 Quoting from wedding videography aesthetics, the film recalls Hansal Mehta’s Dil Par Pat Le Yaar!!/Dude, don’t take it to heart!! (2000) in which a wedding videographers’ life runs amok when his friend returns from Dubai and ropes him into an ill-conceived heist. As the details of the early digital practices fall into place, it turns out that Mehta was a friend of Advani’s from the early years of global satellite television; a riposte between friends’ films is how I want to see this intertextuality.46 Mehta’s own film was shot on celluloid, and he sold it to a company that had a right over its distribution in video, digital, and cable for a period of fifteen years. The box office failure of this twisted caper caused Mehta to take a long sabbatical from filmmaking. As a result of a different set of material conditions, the film has been missing since 2015: the shuttering of Adlabs, where the negative was stored, and its eventual handover to digital processing through Prime Focus. Neither a DVD nor a digital backup exists despite its enthusiastic reception at a repertory at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., June 2003.47 Both films are embraced as cult films with renewed interests in their rehabilitation in the

Fig. 2.1 Wedding videography (Video grab)

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provisional archive of cinemas, which is now in the various corporatized public domains dominated by YouTube. Returning to intertextual relays between the two films brings us to a place of consonance that lands on the shape of videography. Both films, apparently, regale in the interrelatedness of television and video formats whose common use of the monitor more often than not belies their distinctiveness. To be precise, video-recording emerges as a device to entrap the recorder in Mehta’s narrative. In contrast, the very practice of recording opens possibilities of the digital format in Advani’s film, but the recorded data in the diegesis bears a narrative function. The recording of the wedding video that opens the narrative of the film never recurs and none of the characters has the time or inclination for television watching. Rather, the effect achieved in Urf Professor suggests a wider entrée into digital cinema aesthetics in which the film explores through narrative the schema of discrete set ups of black comedy where sex, money, and crime chase each other through the rhythm of editing. Such sequencing of action reveals a modular structuring that has an uncanny resemblance to Lev Manovich’s pioneering assertion in his book Language of New Media (2002) that the advent of the digital ought to be seen as database cinema. The temporal coincidence (2002) between the two expressions—an Indian feature film and a scholarly tract—evokes the zigzag routes of a rhizomatic, the currency of Deleuze and Guattari’s playful theorization.48 Manovich’s armature ‘database cinema’ returns to a coincidence of interests between early cinema and early digital, particularly Dziga Vertov’s films that forward the calculation of modularity. The elegance of Manovich’s formulation has never lost its shine, yet one has to acknowledge that media ecologies are shaped by other archaeologies that may assert themselves as bluntly as geographical and historical inflections. In this regard, Advani’s film borrows its modularity from short-format television programming in which he had honed his skills of sequencing, particularly the tendency towards serialization that forms the structuring principle of his Bheja Fry. An equally plausible inflection can be traced to DVD watching and pause practices that Laura Mulvey and Jonathan Beller identify as pause and rewind functions that raged with the availability of a remote.49 To further burnish this wide range of confluences on cinemas is the practice of editing-for-television, which enframes Urf Professor from start to finish. Database cinema succeeds conceptually when it pauses to consider overlaps of formats of moving images in the age of digital cinema that continue to include analogue and electronic

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materials. Additionally the scope and width of intermedial expressions allows us to retreat from global iterations of the digital as a conveyor of convergence in media studies. Close readings of the opening segment, the pre-credit sequence, in Urf Professor, most persuasively, invite us to see how one of two inaugural films from Digital Talkies offered the digital as already intermedial, placed in a wide media ecology.50 The framing of the potentiality of the digital as always interrelated intimated in the opening segment of the film emphasizes its attention to medium specificity, yet the film is also imbricated in the language of the feature film. Abstracting from the narrative as is routine with opening segments, which Metz classified as descriptive segment to suggest the contiguity of spaces with sparing temporal relations, Urf Professor arranges a thematic of juxtapositions to suggest the arrival of the digital and the deployment of effects in features finished in India. Transitioning from negative to positive, as an effect, to capture a picture of power towers with radiating lines, the film stages its most enduring image: frame right to left a movement of satellite dishes atop bullock carts and subsequently a backward movement, an effect achieved when celluloid rewinds on an editing table, for instance. The film switches to a frontal shot of a caravan of bullock carts whose movement is speeded up forwards and then backwards alongside road traffic, mimicking the prowess of the editor playing with functions of a digital programme so as to vex our definition of fast motion shots. What we see on-screen is the analogue practice of rewinding that emerges with the rhetorical emphasis of a metalepsis to draw attention to the range of varying speeds of moving images in the digital age with the arrival of non-linear editing programmes.51 Random inserts of a horse by the roadside, a cart untethered at the beach, a recording of a whirring toy plane, and speeded up swish pans across the city’s skyscrapers place us in digital Mumbai. As varying arrangements of stillness and movement within a frame and between shots, these images demonstrate the affordances of a smaller digital camera. The segment closes with static white noise generated from a cable television in which the electronic signal degenerates from an arrangement of recognizable images to ‘raining snow’ on-screen; cut-out letters of the title ‘Urf Professor’ appear onscreen. The accompanying soundtrack amplifies juxtaposition by shifting warping metallic sounds into wedding shehnai music, which communicates the sensation of being in the middle of a wedding night gone awry.

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If regaled by the rhythm of these juxtapositions, we have entered the world of film’s wit. Stories of production narrated by Reddy and Das tallied the major chunk of production costs to the hauling of two satellite dishes from a local television station in Goregaon and the hiring of bullock carts with drivers. The extravagantly staged metaphor of contrasts and pictorial irony that has us marvelling at the carting of satellite dishes on the wheels of bullock carts equally conveys the continuum of technologies in the contemporary mediascape. When the images are sped up and rewound, we are further encouraged to consider the formation of algorithms as a discernible picture of bullock carts on-screen and lined up here in the queue so as to generate a narrative digital feature and its firm kinship to satellite television signals that end with the credits. Sound and image travel together and are arranged in ways for viewers to see the first full length digital feature film borne out of the language of satellite television; the mimicking of the film image permits us to use the paradoxical term digital film. Such sustained attention to television with the advent of satellite communication is the one that American cinema studies has rarely reckoned with, yet as Siegfried Zielinski proposes for television in Europe, it is an ‘entracte,’ the gap between celluloid and digital.52 More emphatically, in my reading here it seems telling that film and television inform the expression of cinema. Bullock carts recur and punctuate the diegesis of Urf Professor as pure metaphor of pre-modern life and in the continuum of images, their sequencing begs the question of establishing shots that we often assume as expressions of contexts: city spaces, village vistas, and so on. Here, the recurring image of bullock carts subjected to speed and movements casts this film’s arrival in the context of mediascape/media ecology shaped by a range of technologies whose obsolescence has not yet been pronounced in India, revising the language of establishing shots as well as insisting on the continuing relevance of the intermedial as a conceptual lens for digital features. From the first narrative segment of the film, the wedding night scene, the film moves on to an entirely different space of action: on the road with three gangsters, one of whom is the eponymous protagonist, an ace shooter who doubles as a hired hit. Conversation exchanges on landlines and satellite phones have us witness a hit commissioned by the crestfallen groom to kill his bride at a swimming pool. As is routine in black comedies, hits go awry and here the details rest on the ace shooter

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(the Professor) losing his reading glasses at the opportune moment that blurs his focus as he looks at a photographic portrait of his target. A three-way phone call between the gangster, the Professor, and the wanking husband is again arranged through landlines and mobile phones. Following instructions, the Professor trains his rifle and shoots at the wrong swimmer with the right costume. While we are in stitches over the fatal gaffe, the mise en abyme effect of the blur that the film produces, unwaveringly for our benefit and narratively assigned to the Professor’s hyperopia, emerges as an image of hesitation towards the formation of picture, literally a still photograph. Urf Professor serves up other versions of fuzziness, when in one of the later set ups in the modular structure narrates a struggling actor’s delirium on discovering his luck at the daily lottery draw by resorting to distortions of extreme anamorphic lensing. Calibrating the ocular when using a lightweight camera shores up the question of speed of the recorded image and draws attention to the blur, which visual theorists have isolated as one of the emerging features of the digital. Of relevance here, although exclusively devoted to photographic practices, Bernd Hüppauf’s compelling revisionism of blur and fuzziness with the advent of digital offerings is worth embracing; I shall borrow a lengthy quotation as a guiding inflection for this book as well53 : The rise of fuzzy images can be interpreted as an act of quiet resistance. Under these new conditions, fuzziness offered itself as an opposition and a way of frustrating expectations. The dissolution of forms and contours is one attempt at re-investing images with faculties lost to their earlier perfection and create, once again, a space that is their own. (…) Fuzziness, is a soft form of opposition to the market of glamorous, yet empty and meaningless, photography, and an attempt to strip it of its commodity character. It combines this resistance with an attempt to re-invigorate through opening a space for the creative imagination.

It comes as no surprise that Hüppauf’s provocation would find kin among cinema theorists: as seen, for instance, in the path-breaking edited collection Indefinite Visions.54 In the introduction to the collection, Martine Beugnet puts aside aspirations for clarity drawn from the quarters of Cartesian logic in favour of ‘Vague, indefinite, yet full of details: (…) Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz’s classic concept of the ‘clear but confused.’ In an otherwise marvellous collection of essays, with a focus on European and American practices in the arts of cinema, a scholar of digital

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India resonates mostly with the introduction, which reminds us of the artist and theorist Hito Steyrl’s unflinching campaign for the consideration of the ‘poor image’ as recalcitrant against capitalism that is more often than not fuzzy.55 To wedge my archive of films into these discussions demands a consideration of the mutually reinforcing practices on the one hand, of marvelling at the range of details that the digital affords, alongside fuzziness and blurring, in their immense capacity to record miniscule movement to the point of blurring. On the other hand, the persistent rage against obsolescence by first world technologies leaves filmmakers to contend with breakneck transformation of formats in camera, editing, and most of all in backup technologies. Of all the confounding problems, expensive backup enterprises invariably have narrative features gone missing, accidentally erased, or unable to retrieve or restore in obsolete formats. As studied and directed as global capitalism is, Advani’s film offers a purview of the shape of precarity in the narrative with the efforts to corner the winning lottery ticket, a gag that cuts across distinct modules and wins over the attention for a suitcase of cash that is squandered at a trash site. The randomness of luck at the lotteries dovetails the place of ending in a modular structure that does not assure a singular closure and diverts our attention to Advani’s attachment to David Lynch, to whom the film pays homage through the Professor’s wheezing. Towards the end, the film runs out of breath literally with the Professor’s inhaler being out of reach in a scuffle; the struggling pathetic actor eats the winning ticket. The backwoods doctor chances upon the actor, whose request for surgery to extract the ticket from his entrails meets an extravagant fatal ending; and the doctor’s ecstasy on bagging the winnings shapes as a dervish swirl to the stream of street lights.56 The ending, both gruesome and slapstick, insists on approximating randomness, a recurring feature of algorithmic arrangements that narrative cinema controls and all too often, its material conditions undo. These possibilities of smooth digital transformation of cinema with its attendant obstructions and shortcomings, prefigure in Urf Professor’s production, narrative, and viewing, marking it as an urtext whose return in updated algorithms online may never halt its endless metamorphosis and its continuing allure for cinephiles.

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Divya Drishti/The Divine Vision (2001) What of the fate of the other film that lays claims to being the other first digital feature: Sidharth Srinivasan’s Divya Drishti/The Divine Vision (2001)? ‘Everything is etched on the forehead’ are the first lines of the film, uttered by a voice-over that is soon attributed to a charlatan clairvoyant, whose own deteriorating eyesight wrecked by alcohol has him pronouncing truths till the very end of the film, much to his detriment. For this film, this pronouncement that is nothing short of a homily in the primer of fatalism, appears to prefigure its longevity in the digital era. Having been banished to the stacks of lost films turns out to be the fate of this remarkable work, whose salvaging from the dustbin of history is long overdue. After its inaugural screening in Delhi, outside the official precincts of the Habitat Centre, the chosen venue of the ITC Digital Talkies International Film Festival, Divya Drishti (DD) had a robust festival circulation for a long year: Commonwealth Film Festival (2002), Singapore International Film Festival (2002), Walker Art Center (2002), Museum of Contemporary Art (2003), and Cinema Nova Brussels. Additionally, it was in competition at Venezia 57 Corto Cortissimo and won awards for screenplay and acting at the Karachi International Film Fest in Pakistan (2001). None of these recognitions could outmanoeuvre the Board of Censors, which banned the film from theatrical distribution in India for its recourse to profanity. With a commitment to the prerequisite of the digital format as prescribed by the film festival, Srinivasan shot the film on a MiniDV camcorder VX 2000 over a seven-day stretch and subsequently edited it on Final Cut Pro, production costs totalling a shoestring budget of six lakh rupees. For ninety-five minutes in Standard Definition format, at about 50 GB (state of the art in 2001 before High Definition format became industry standard), we witness the comings and goings of the residents of a housing colony named Sai Shraddha. Today, the film can be borrowed on request from the director as a compressed video file and plays only on .mov format. As if anticipating its own subsequent banishment to digital bytes and the migration to other formats that are on the verge of obsolescence, the film’s narrative assumes the point of view of an immigrant in the opening segment that matches re-dramatized found sound commentary attributed to a programme on the state-run radio ‘All India Radio’ called ‘Amchi Bombay.’ The soundtrack matches images of a camera recording the long corridors of travel in Mumbai by being stationed on both a commuter

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train and an automobile that pushes towards abstraction: travelling shots from trains and swaying of metal handles on commuter trains. These moving compositions of various scales simulating the speed of urban life and further doubling on the soundtrack—the radio announcer’s interview reveals that the recent immigrant is from Delhi—set the tone for the spirit of urban Mumbai as a city of immigrants.57 A sudden change in composition, indicating a shift in the speed and shape of the travelling shot, reveals the vista possible from an automobile. We drive and enter the dusty roads of a new neighbourhood with its tall white flats, which ends bombastically with a bomb blast into the Sahyadri Hills and the announcer uttering ‘Welcome to Bombay.’ Slow-moving dust rolls over the rubble as we lay our eyes open to a town springing up against the hills, hills that will be flattened further and mined for housing in periurban East Goregaon. Against the bright white light of day, a diurnal effect opted as a costsaving aesthetic, the film spins a tale in which horizontal neighbourliness, literally across two facing windows of two vertical towers, strains the moods of wives at home, whereas the husbands, one a watchman and the other a shopkeeper, draw on the wild edges of the grid of this newly forming colony for their sexual rendezvous. Yet another line of the plot has the local postman’s tryst with one of the wives resulting in pregnancy, while the other young wife pines away at home for her husband’s affection. The secret escapades shaping the tender homosexual romance between the two husbands was initially proposed by the watchman and executed by his keen eye on unsupervised corners of the wilds. Closer to home, the shopkeeper’s precocious daughter commandeers the gravel pile and rubble as her playground. In a corner away from the white heights and between tin sheets stands a tea shop, and caddy corner from there, the clairvoyant’s makeshift counselling space under a tree is within earshot of his lackey. When we are finally privy to the form of the clairvoyant’s visions, after he loses his eyesight, the drama shifts to his blunt pronouncements: ‘a girl and not a boy will be born; your husband doesn’t love you’ and so on. We see these as blurs, to literalize his failing vision, but they are rendered as long-awaited truths in the drama. With considerable restraint with digital effects, DD also encloses its story/plot as being absent of televisual presence, though radio and telephones provide intermedial textures in this brink of a space. Retaining actions of the colony with simmering turbulences away in the wilds and in the ramshackle corner, the film offers the shape of desire, betrayal, and clairvoyance that the grid of the new flats can barely contain.

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Fast-paced dialogues, written by director Kamal Swaroop, return us to the zaniness of his own debut feature film, Om Dar-B-Dar (1988), whose cult status had similar struggles at official distribution within a closed economy, and its recent digitized version has finally endowed it the official stamp as a canonical work of independent cinema. Srinivasan’s exploration of space as place, as if evoking Henri Lefevre, has us marvelling at the documenting of the region of Goregaon East whose future arteries will lead to Film City as the deemed studio backlots for the powerful local industry. Space as a contender in the narrative encourages comparisons to images of razed dams, damned factories, and theme parks that are now etched in my cinephile’s archive of Jia Zhangke’s recording of post-Maoist China, most vividly present in Still Life (2006) and 24 City (2008). Divya Drishti precedes Jia’s works and is equally deserving of similar accolades for its studied evaluation of state-built housing; here too is a landscape of colonies, dust clouds, cranes and rubble, and ravaged hillsides to suggest the shape of precarity, as a figure of hesitation, that we have since learned to associate with narratives of economic progress. In reverse emphasis of lost icons of Maoist China, figuring in Jia’s films, DD invites us to note the grip of prophetic pronouncements that arises in the midst of rapid progress, more nihilistically delivered with the rise of a political avatar—the clairvoyant’s lackey—literally from the rubble and ruins of interpersonal relations as the end of the film. Minimalist, equally in terms of location, DD warrants traces of homage that lead us to the industrial smoke unfurling from Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964).58 In a radial towards American practices, the exercises of matching sound and image echo the structuralist materialist style of James Benning. Many other influences and engagements with world cinema are updated in these films, so as to consider Srinivasan’s style across this film and the later Pairon Talle/Soul of Sand (2010) as a mise en scène director. Cordoned off spaces recur in the second feature, set against a ruined factory in the outskirts of Delhi, which invite us to immerse ourselves in this desolate space of a ruined factory manned by a hapless watchman whose wife is sexually exploited by the owner of the factory. The owner’s random drop-ins provide a disturbance to the couple’s life and the film orients us to its vastness in wide shots as well as the location of smaller spaces of the home. Against the clarity of exploitation that we behold, a strange blur materializes into the shape of the killer, whose hooded face

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on a motorcycle lends a sharp shiver to the stasis of class antagonisms that we witness and endure as viewers. A different archaeology of citations is to be accounted for, persuaded by the available notes online on Srinivasan’s assistantship with Kumar Shahini, that recall the independent cinemas of the 1970s and the long shadow they continue to cast on independent cinemas in the digital age, the age of online retrievals. In a recent expansive evaluation of Shahini’s films and writings, Ashish Rajadhyaksha lavishes praise on the ‘…projection of an inner condition upon a desolate outside environment’ that the filmmaker accomplishes through the wanderings of the protagonist, Taran, in Maya Darpan (1972), across a desert landscape in which a new town is designed to be built.59 Attention to the mise en scène governs both of Srinivasan’s films, and in both we find a reprisal of the aesthetics of middle cinema prevalent in the 1970s updated with nihilism for the digital age.60 Towards the end of DD, for example, the girl throws a rock at the clairvoyant, a gesture that recalls the freeze frame from Shyam Benegal’s Ankur (1977) that Madhava Prasad writes of belatedness of the law in the reformist aesthetics of middle cinema. In Pairon Talle, the captivity narrative evokes the rural exploitation of Benegal’s earlier film Nishant (1975). In these recalls, both implicit and explicit retrievals from the archives of Benegal’s oeuvre, the figuration of the mise en scène in Srinivasan’s films are differently cast. In both DD and Pairon Talle, spaces of action are not set as backdrops as they are in Benegal’s works, but are more fully vivid in their figuration as an attribute of the narrative.61 Such reworking of Benegal’s films set alongside an avowed apprenticeship to Shahini, whose claims of distance from the style of middle cinema’s humanist aesthetics, evokes an uncanny resemblance between the two filmmakers whose practices for too long have been seen as antagonistic rather than consonant. On my chancing on this unexpected match, seen through Srinivasan’s films, filmmaker Amitabh Chakraborty’s response to my speculation is to return to yet an earlier moment of non-commercial cinemas in India: Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969) that was shot by K.K. Mahajan, who turns out to be the cinematographer who supplied the language of neorealism to all three filmmakers. Srinivasan’s DD revisits this period yet with a focus on the elemental—camera following the slow ripple of smoke from the blast into the hills and away from the protagonist—to open an aperture into consideration of a mise en scène with its own vitality and vibrancy, post-human, an homage.62

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With the immersion in the ruins of the factory in Pairon Talle, we return to yet another version of attentiveness to topography, which classifies both feature films as landscape films; they resonate with contemporary filmmaking practices globally in their common staging of disenchantment with the promises of progress, and turn a keen eye to the attendant ravaging of the environment. Sean Cubitt’s offer of ‘eco-horror’ is the turnkey to classify films that allow us as viewers to describe films that grapple with the precarity of our lives under global capitalism—thematic provocations that undergird contemporary horror film narratives.63 As we witness in narratives of globalization, these films propel us to forget anterior modes of production, either as ruins or erasures on the landscape; films retain memories of times and spaces lost and altered, as moving image archives. The turn outwards to the perimeters of a metropolis, Delhi in this film, and the up and coming housing complex of Goregaon in Divya Drishti, are ways of thinking of the space of action in peri-urban spaces as theatres of darkness in the expanding economies of production and consumption. From these ruins of an abandoned factory and these perimeter spaces, entire cities have sprung up since their staging in Srinivasan’s film. Although unacknowledged as a watershed moment by contemporary filmmakers, I place Srinivasan’s films at the centre of an aesthetic that returns our attention to the mise en scène, in particular the aesthetics of periurban spaces that have arrived with a force in neo-noir films. Here we are in Agamben’s territory, of reading Foucault on the dispositif, as well as film theory’s enduring commitment to the ideological underpinnings of the cinematic apparatus.64 Far from redundant, as we have seen, apparatus theories are strongly relevant alongside the renewed focus on theories of mise en scène. Foremost among these films, which deserve to be considered as an engagement with Srinivasan’s films, is Shankar Raman’s Gurgaon (2017). The latter film sets its narrative in the space of land speculations and gender inequities; social and political antagonisms hit a punitive pitch.65 ‘Sharp as glass’ is how I described the film in my opening remarks at the 3rd i Film Festival in 2017, drawing attention to the film’s mise en scène that drew on the contemporary architecture of the glass and steel homes of Gurgaon’s political class that allows the characters access to exchange of looks and points of view across the transparency of glass. Such delivery of architecture as bearing vitality reconfigures the neo-noir feature in the post-celluloid age. Looking back, it is DD that pioneered the sketching

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of that space of action in the peri-urban, as the mainstay for the cinemas of digital capitalism, spotting the skewed distribution of resources in the first decade of liberalization that would take on neo-noir as one vector in the language of modular storytelling. It seems only fitting that, even as the viewer chances upon these two first digital feature films through lost formats of early digital, in so doing one also has to acknowledge that the erasure of past histories of these periurban spaces—agricultural, state modernization, tribal land grabs—form an integral part of their medium specificity in the digital age. These works, lost in their original format and barely available, are haunted by their own documentation of the rapidly transforming pro-filmic that they converted as their mise en scène. While these rising monuments to digital-driven prosperity in periurban regions and call centre towers beating to the drum of global capitalism capture the photogenic aspects of the dystopia narrated in the films, they are already dated as independent films from the first decade of digital cinema. Sooner or later, the façade of digital economies would slip so as to enforce our reckoning with electronic waste that would arrive on the heels of this new medium.66 Feature films would deal with bungling and mishaps, as in Kannu Behl’s Titli (2014), that set the action in the alleyways of new outer regions of the metropolis, consolidating a Punjabi-Haryanvi language cinema, given a fillip initally by Love Sex Aur Dhoka (2010). A chase through a landfill site, piled high with waste and attendant pigeons, would open spaces other than the high-rises of Gurgaon. Established film industries would have their share of independent cinemas, as my chapter ‘Tamil New Wave’ explores. As the centre of offshore digital services, Chennai-based Tamil cinema equally coalesces its action in landscapes of waste, also a by-product of globalization. Here too, nearly lost works such as Kumararaja’s neo-noir Aaranya Kaandam (2010), a central text in Chapter 5 ‘Tamil New Wave,’ endows landscapes of industrial waste an unprecedented amount of time on-screen by setting chase sequences in the midst of steaming garbage and circling crows. These are films that emerge as archives by recording in their mise en scène landscapes of waste, while courting their own obsolescence and disappearance.67

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Notes 1. Walid Ra’ad’s art practice has long been an inspiration here. The different ways in which he has been committed to writing the history of Lebanon from impossible points of view offer lessons in the storied disciplines of history writing. 2. For a solid account of how contemporary artists have taken on the idea of the archive, see Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 3. For an account of how artists have countered gaps in archives, see Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Ayisha Abraham’s Straight 8,’ New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film xi.2–3 (2013): 159–68. Also see Abraham’s own writing of her process: Ayisha Abraham, ‘Deteriorating Memories: Blurring Fact and Fiction in Home Movies in India,’ in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, eds. Karen I. Ishizuka and Patricia Rodden Zimmermann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007): 168–84. 4. With all the hubris in place, I write this chapter as a long letter to Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire( s) du cinema (2011). 5. For the classic that always serves as a reminder, see Hayden V. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 6. Nirmala Ravindran, ‘Curtain Call,’ India Today, May 29, 2008 (Retrieved January 1, 2014). 7. Ayisha Abraham is that friend, an artist, whose own interest in deteriorating celluloid is most evident in her film Straight 8 (2005). For a reading of her film, see my essay: ‘Ayisha Abraham’s Straight 8.’ 8. Neepa Majumdar, ‘Film Fragments, Documentary History, and Colonial Indian Cinema,’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16.1 (2007): 63–79. For a grand sweep of Indian cinema studies, see Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 9. As we made our way through the 150-minute film dramatizing the slow conversion of the subaltern Mangal Pandey from a loyal soldier in the British army to a revolutionary leader who plays a crucial role in the first war of Indian independence in 1857, we were numbed by the glossy drama that was cynically poised to address the nationalist citizenry as so many other films had similarly attempted to do in the last few years. The slew of films includes one on the other revolutionary leader Bhagat Singh and of course, Lagaan (2001), on whose coattails these films were riding, hoping to strike another box office hit. Despite its disappointing attempts at storytelling, Mangal Pandey: The Rising holds out a few promising moments in the song and dance sequences and fleeting images

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of truncated sequences that deserved more exploration: the confrontation between nationalists and Zohrabjee at his cartridge factory recalls scenes of abattoirs in cinema—Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (1949), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978); the homoerotic relationship between Captain Gordon and Pandey; battle scenes shot in Tajikistan; and so on. But in Mangal Pandey: The Rising these references are quick and careless. 10. G. Seetharaman, ‘Short Films and Documentaries Aired Before Movies in Cinemas Became a Laughing Stock,’ Economic Times, June 2, 2013 (Retrieved December 28, 2013). 11. The reference to Derrida’s reading of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents as a tussle between remembering and archiving is obvious. From my end, the arrival of a postcolonial nation evokes a synchronicity with projects of modernity whose wide sweep over Europe will give rise to a method of inquiry akin to archaeological excavations, to contend with archiving of suppression and delving into structures of repression. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 12. The formulation of a compilation film has undergone sufficient shift as archives continue to be mined. For an initial formulation on footage used in documentary and non-narrative films, see Jey Leyda, Films Beget Films: A Study of Compilation Films (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964). William Wees’ interests are turned towards American avant-garde filmmakers in his Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993), in which he defines a compilation film as being assembled by using actualities, are most recognizable in the following manner: Their montage may make spectators ‘more alert to the broader meanings of old materials,’ but as a rule they do not make them more alert to montage as a method of composition and (more or less explicit) argument. (36) 13. In a literal sense the name and place for the film archive of the nation is at Pune, National Film Archive, whose cataloguing and collection rationale deserves a serious study in the near future. For a biopic of one of the more flamboyant directors of the archive, P.K. Nair, see, Shivendra Dungarpur’s Celluloid Man (2012). Dungarpur’s film goes the mile in describing Nair’s far-reaching commitment to building a world-class film archive. 14. Jag Mohan, Documentary Films and Indian Awakening (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1990), 17. 15. Research was undertaken at the Motion Pictures Library, Library of Congress 2006–07; National Archives, Washington, D.C., 2006–07;

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17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

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UCLA’s Film and Television Archive 2006; Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, 2006–07. Jag Mohan, Dr. P. V. Pathy, Documentary Film Maker (1906–1961). Monograph & Compilation by Jag Mohan (Poona: National Film Archive of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1972). Mohan, Dr. P. V. Pathy, Documentary Film Maker (1906–1961), 66. For Charles Sanders Peirce’s continuing relevance, see Laura Mulvey’s finessing of indexical signification in Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 9. Thanks to Roberto Tejada for directing me to Stoichita. I want to evoke my colleague and friend Nancy Schiesari’s formulation of her response to using actualities in an archive as being akin to bodies in a morgue that are rolled out for research: hours of dull routine broken by the spell of an image that comes alive on its gurney demanding our ability to resuscitate the author of a dead image (Personal correspondence, December 2012). Narayani Gupta, ‘Pictorializing the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857,’ in Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850– 1900, ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2003), 216–39; 225. Gupta, ‘Pictorializing the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857,’ 227. Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turnof -the Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Carol Breckenridge’s pathbreaking essay sets the tone for exploring the place of panoramas in exhibitions about colonial India in London: ‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World’s Fairs,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 31.2 (Spring 1989): 195– 216. For a book that matches the size of panoramas themselves, see Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). This line of inquiry characterizes the scholarship of media archaeology. I owe my own interest in the large corpus of visual material generated by British illustrators in middle-brow books on India to artist Rajkamal Kahlon’s multimedia works. See my essay on her work: ‘Blow me a Kiss, Rajkamal Kahlon!’ in Rajkamal Kahlon: Doppelbilder/Double Vision (Berlin: Kerber Press, 2012): 18–23. Attention to the form of animation currently abounds in Cinema Studies. My own attunement to this form has been enriched by Thomas Lamarre’s essay: ‘From Animation to Anime: Drawing Movements and Moving

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29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

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Drawings,’ Japan Forum 14.2 (2002): 329–67. An expansive engagement with anime follows in his book, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Godard’s proclamations always provide inspiration for writing and overcoming impasses. This moment may have me turning to his Dziga Vertov days, which in turn has me in the world of Soviet filmmakers and their theorization of editing. Ketan Mehta’s FTII training, for sure, draws out his familiarity with Soviet filmmakers’s philosophies on editing; Eisenstein films and writings foremost of them. From the vast corpus of Eisenstein’s writings, I want to identify the following for their relevance at this juncture in the essay: Sergei M. Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). For an updated translation of Eisenstein’s landmark essay, see Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Film Attractions,’ in Defining Cinema, ed. Peter Lehman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 17–36. For this discussion of frame rates and filmmaking in the direction of Andy Warhol, I owe thanks to Bogdan Perzynski. ´ For a comprehensive review of Warhol’s film works in the age of digital preservation please refer to MOMA’s show: ‘Andy Warhol: Screen Tests,’ May 1–September 1, 2003, organized by Mary Lea Bandy, Chief Curator, Department of Film and Media. Homay King, ‘Girl Interrupted: The Queer Time of Warhol’s Cinema,’ Discourse 28.1 (2006): 98–120. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 1st Schocken paperback ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 219–26. A rash of films on Gandhi have been flooding the theatres since Hey Ram! (2000). For my particular interest in the archive of the moving image, I would like to single out Girish Kasaravalli’s Koormavatara (2011) that has a protagonist playing the role of Gandhi in a TV serial. I am grateful for this framing of Homai Vyarawalla’s photographs in Sabeena Gadihoke’s book: India in Focus: Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla (New Delhi: Parzor Foundation in association with Mapin Pub, 2006). In contrast to the dearth of film footage on the struggle for freedom, in a nod to Warhol, Gandhi has achieved ascendancy as an icon of adulation and meditation by a range of visual artists. Atul Dodiya’s series of works on Gandhi is poised as a return to an alternative polity in the aftermath of the Godhra riots, the wretched pogrom against Muslims. My references to Dodiya’s works are from his show: Experiments with Truth: Atul Dodiya Works 1981–2013, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, November 15, 2013–December 29, 2013. The title of the show is plucked from the title of Gandhi’s autobiography. More recently, two gallery shows in New York

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with a focus on Gandhi by contemporary artists in India have caught the eye: Alisha Haridasani Gupta, ‘The Many Faces of the Mahatma.’ The New York Times, Friday October 11, 2019, 15. 36. Michael Ann Holly, ‘The Melancholy Art,’ The Art Bulletin 89.1 (March 2007): 7–17; 13. 37. Janet Harbord, Ex-centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 48. 38. In another section, Janet Harbord emphasizes Agamben’s attention to assistants as a way of writing on ex-centric cinema. Here is one such quote early in the book: In a number of essays, Agamben renders Kafka’s assistants and Benjamin’s hunchback as figures whose ordinariness shines on judgement day, inverting the terms of success and productivity. (16) 39. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Afterword—Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies,’ in Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices, ed. Bruce Bennett, Marc Furstenau, and Adrian Mackenzie (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 226–40; 232. 40. Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). A standard practice in Cinema Studies scholarship is the exploration of the steady move from celluloid to digital in world cinema, even as it has been extensively documented almost exclusively in favour of America cinema. While there has been much detailing of the transnational movement towards digital technologies and the redundancy of national financial capital, American cinema repeatedly figures as the touchstone for speculating on the advent of the digital in narrative cinemas—its own national inflections remain unremarked for the most part. It is worth also noting that a strain of writing on special effects in narrative cinema has been keen on including a range of CGIs and digital effects in East Asian cinemas (Kristen Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema [Durham: Duke University Press, 2014]). Whether the digital harbours national style, as it is adopted in specific film cultures, is still underdeveloped and will serve as grist for subsequent scholarship. For the most part, however, other national cinemas have yet to record this shift except in terms of auteur-based art house films or new wave movements in the age of digital, an overlook that shapes up a little differently in the cinemas of India. 41. For an early and solid reading of the economy of multiplexes in India, see Adrian Athique and Douglas Hill, The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure (New York: Routledge, 2010). For her pioneering consideration of the genre of the multiplex film, see Ranjani

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45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

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Mazumdar, ‘Terrorism, Conspiracy, and Surveillance in Bombay’s Urban Cinema,’ Social Research 78.1 (2011): 143–72. Arati Dhar, ‘Unleashing a Digital Revolution,’ The Hindu, October 1, 2000 (Accessed July 20, 2018). Culled from several conversations with Radhika Reddy over the months of 2018 and interviews with Chirantan Das, August–December 2018. See Nandini Ramnath’s engaging review of the film and Avijit Mukul Kishore and Rohan Shivkumar’s programme at Jio MAMI, October 2015: Nandini Ramnath, ‘Cult Cinema: Lessons in Controlled Madness from Pankaj Advani’s ‘Urf Professor’,’ Scroll.in, October 28, 2015. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). Personal conversation with Hansal Mehta, June 2018. Thanks to Tom Vick, Film Programmer at the Freer and Sackler Galleries for inviting me to curate ‘Action Films in Bollywood’ at the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art, Smithsonian Museums, Washington, D.C., June 2003. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977). For never ending pleasures of reading a cinephile’s move from analogue to digital see Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second. For one of the earliest theories of pause and rewind, see Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2006). For a fine collection of essays on the place of DVD in film scholarship, see James Bennett and Tom Brown, eds., Film and Television After DVD (New York: Routledge, 2008). References to satellite television per se abound in the film and emerge as a sight for attachment in the recent newspaper review from the last curated screening. I am borrowing from Ágnes Peth˝ o’s pathbreaking work on the figuration of intermediality. Here, the particular reference is to Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-between (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History, trans. Gloria Custance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999). I cannot pass up the opportunity to play with Gina Marchetti on the handy punning possibilities available here: René Clair’s Dadaist film Entr’acte (1924).

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53. Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Between Imitation and Simulation: Towards an Aesthetics of Fuzzy Images,’ in Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination the Image Between the Visible and the Invisible, eds. Bernd Hüppauf and Christoph Wulf (New York: Routledge, 2009), 230–53; 248–49. 54. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit, eds., Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 55. Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image,’ E-flux Journal #10 (November 2009). 56. For a breathtaking reading of air in cinema, see Kevin L. Ferguson, ‘Panting in the Dark: The Ambivalence of Air in Cinema,’ Camera Obscura 26.2 (2011): 33–63. 57. For a theorization of digital scale, see Michel Chion, ‘Jumps in Scale,’ in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, 123–30. 58. Recent scholarship on Antonioni’s films have cast his films in the currency of eco-cinema. For instance, see the excellent collection essays commemorating his birth centenary: Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, eds., Antonioni: Centenary Essays (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Another reframing on Italian cinemas as environmental, see Elena Past, Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2019). 59. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘Kumar Shahini Now,’ in Kumar Shahani: The Shock of Desire and Other Essays, ed. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, 1st ed. (New Delhi: Tulika Books in association with the Raza Foundation, 2015), 10–97; 20. 60. For a critical evaluation of state funding and aesthetics of middle cinema, see Madhava M. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 61. My reading of mise en scène has undergone the most substantial revision over the years thanks to Adrian Martin’s essays in Senses of Cinema and his landmark book: Mise En Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 62. I want to draw attention to the duration of the rolling smoke in Antonioni’s Red Desert . I present a different reading of the vitality of the environment in my essay of FTII Diploma films: Lalitha Gopalan, ‘The Enchanted Worlds of the FTII Diploma Films,’ Screen 58.1 (2017): 90–97. 63. Sean Cubitt, ‘Film, Landscape and Political Aesthetics: Deseret,’ Screen 57.1 (2016): 21–34. 64. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). 65. My assessment of Gurgaon’s urban growth has been gleaned by my own ethnography but most of all by the following works for their depth of knowledge on architecture and urbanization: Rohan Kalyan, Neo Delhi

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and the Politics of Postcolonial Urbanism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2017), 175–205; Rohan Kalyan, ‘Fragmentation by Design: Architecture, Finance and Identity,’ Grey Room 44 (2011): 26–53; Sanjay Srivastava, Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015); Nathan Rich, ‘Locally Fractured: The Extraordinary Development of Gurgaon, India,’ in Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, ed. Peggy Deamer (New York: Routledge, 2014), 172–88; Sumit Vij et al., ‘From the Core to the Periphery: Conflicts and Cooperation over Land and Water in Periurban Gurgaon, India,’ Land Use Policy 76 (2018): 382–90. 66. On a splendid reading of this waste, see Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2011). 67. Ackbar Abbas’ melancholic reading of the continuing disappearance of city scape of Hong Kong has a long lingering influence in my reading: Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Bibliography Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Abraham, Ayisha. ‘Deteriorating Memories: Blurring Fact and Fiction in Home Movies in India.’ In Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, edited by Karen I. Ishizuka and Patricia Rodden Zimmermann, 168–84. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ‘Action Films in Bollywood’ at the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art, Smithsonian Museums, Washington D.C., June 2003. Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009. ‘Andy Warhol: Screen Tests,’ May 1–September 1, 2003, organised by Mary Lea Bandy, Chief Curator, Department of Film and Media (MOMA). Athique, Adrian, and Douglas Hill. The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure. New York: Routledge, 2010. Atul Dodiya’s works are from his show: Experiments with Truth: Atul Dodiya Works 1981–2013, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, November 15, 2013–December 29, 2013. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 219–26. New York: Schocken Books, 1970.

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Bennett, James, and Tom Brown, eds. Film and Television After DVD. New York: Routledge, 2008. Beugnet, Martine, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit, eds. Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Breckenridge, Carol. ‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World’s Fairs.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 31.2 (Spring 1989): 195–216. Chion, Michel. ‘Jumps in Scale.’ In Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, edited by Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit, 123–30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. ———. ‘Film, Landscape and Political Aesthetics: Deseret.’ Screen 57.1 (2016): 21–34. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Dhar, Arati. ‘Unleashing a Digital Revolution.’ The Hindu, October 1, 2000 (Accessed July 20, 2018). Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Edited and Translated by Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. ———. ‘The Montage of Film Attractions.’ In Defining Cinema, edited by Peter Lehman, 17–36. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Afterword—Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies.’ In Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices, edited by Bruce Bennett, Marc Furstenau, and Adrian Mackenzie, 226–40. Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Ferguson, Kevin L. ‘Panting in the Dark: The Ambivalence of Air in Cinema.’ Camera Obscura 26.2 (2011): 33–63. Gabrys, Jennifer. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Gadihoke, Sabeena. India in Focus: Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla. New Delhi: Mapin Publishing, 2006. Gopalan, Lalitha. ‘Blow Me a Kiss, Rajkamal Kahlon!’ In Rajkamal Kahlon: Doppelbilder/Double Vision, edited by Miriam Oesterreich and Reinhard Spieler, 18–23. Berlin: Kerber Press, 2012. ———. ‘Ayisha Abraham’s Straight 8.’ New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 11.2/3 (2013): 159–68. ———. ‘The Enchanted Worlds of the FTII Diploma Films.’ Screen 58.1 (2017): 90–97.

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Griffiths, Alison. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-theCentury Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Gupta, Alisha Haridasani. ’The Many Faces of the Mahatma.’ The New York Times, Friday October 11, 2019. Gupta, Narayani. ‘Pictorializing the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857.’ In Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850–1900, edited by Maria Antonella Pelizzari, 216–39. Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2003. Harbord, Janet. Ex-centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Holly, Michael Ann. ‘The Melancholy Art.’ The Art Bulletin 89.1 (March 2007): 7–17. Huhtamo, Erkki. Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Hüppauf, Bernd. ‘Between Imitation and Simulation: Towards an Aesthetics of Fuzzy Images.’ In The Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination: The Image Between the Visible and the Invisible, edited by Bernd Hüppauf and Christoph Wulf, 230–53. New York: Routledge, 2009. Kalyan, Rohan. ‘Fragmentation by Design: Architecture, Finance and Identity.’ Grey Room 44 (2011): 26–53. ———. Neo Delhi and the Politics of Postcolonial Urbanism. New Delhi: Routledge, 2017. King, Homay. ‘Girl Interrupted: The Queer Time of Warhol’s Cinema.’ Discourse 28.1 (2006): 98–120. Lamarre, Thomas. ‘From Animation to Anime: Drawing Movements and Moving Drawings.’ Japan Forum 14.2 (2002): 329–67. ———. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Leyda, Jay. Films Beget Films: A Study of Compilation Films. New York: Hill & Wang, 1964. Majumdar, Neepa. ‘Film Fragments, Documentary History, and Colonial Indian Cinema.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16.1 (2007): 63–79. Martin, Adrian. Mise En Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Mazumdar, Ranjani. ‘Terrorism, Conspiracy, and Surveillance in Bombay’s Urban Cinema.’ Social Research 78.1 (2011): 143–72. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Mohan, Jag. Documentary Films and Indian Awakening. New Delhi: Publications Division, 1990.

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Mohan, Jag. Dr. P. V. Pathy, Documentary Film Maker (1906–1961). Poona: National Film Archive of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1972. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Past, Elena. Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Peth˝ o, Ágnes. Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Prasad, Madhava M. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. ‘Kumar Shahini Now.’ In Kumar Shahani: The Shock of Desire and Other Essays, edited by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, 10–97. New Delhi: Tulika Books in association with the Raza Foundation, 2015. Ramnath, Nandini. ‘Cult Cinema: Lessons in Controlled Madness from Pankaj Advani’s “Urf Professor”.’ Scroll, October 28, 2015. Rascaroli, Laura, and John David Rhodes, eds. Antonioni: Centenary Essays. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Ravindran, Nirmala. ‘Curtain Call.’ India Today, May 29, 2008 (Retrieved January 1, 2014). Rich, Nathan. ‘Locally Fractured: The Extraordinary Development of Gurgaon, India.’ In Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, edited by Peggy Deamer, 172–88. New York: Routledge, 2014. Seetharaman, G. ‘Short Films and Documentaries Aired Before Movies in Cinemas Became a Laughing Stock.’ Economic Times, June 2, 2013 (Retrieved December 28, 2013). Spieker, Sven. The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Srivastava, Sanjay. Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. Steyerl, Hito. ‘In Defense of the Poor Image.’ e-flux Journal #10, November 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poorimage/. Stoichita, Victor I. A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. Vasudevan, Ravi. The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Vij, Sumit, Vishal Narain, Timothy Karpouzoglou, and Pratik Mishra. ‘From the Core to the Periphery: Conflicts and Cooperation over Land and Water in Periurban Gurgaon, India.’ Land Use Policy 76 (2018): 382–90. Wees, William. Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993.

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Whissel, Kristen. Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. White, Hayden V. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Zielinski, Siegfried. Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History. Translated by Gloria Custance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999.

Filmography 24 City. Directed by Jia Zhangke (2008). Aaranya Kaandam. Thiagarajan Kumararaja (2010). Ankur. Directed by Shyam Benegal (1974). Bhavni Bhavai. Directed by Ketan Mehta (1980). Bheja Fry. Directed by Sagar Ballary (2007). Bhuvan Shome. Directed by Mrinal Sen (1969). Blood of the Beasts . Directed by Georges Franju (1949). Celluloid Man. Directed by Shivendra Dungapur (2012). Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar! Directed by Hansal Mehta (2000). Divya Drishti. Directed by Sidharth Srinivasan (2002). Entr’acte. Directed by Rene Clair (1924). Gandhi. Directed by Richard Attenborough (1982). Gurgaon. Directed by Shankar Raman (2016). Haazaron Kwashein Mein. Directed by Sudhir Mishra (2003). Hey Ram. Directed by Kamal Haasan (2000). Histoire(s) du Cinema. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard (2011). In a Year With 13 Moons. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978). Kill Bill Vol. 1. Directed by Quentin Tarantino (2003). Koormavatara. Directed by Girish Kasaravalli (2011). Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. Directed by Ashutosh Gowariker (2001). Le Petit Soldat . Directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1963). LSD: Love, Sex Aur Dhoka. Directed by Dibakar Banerjee (2010). Mangal Pandey: The Rising . Directed by Ketan Mehta (2005). Maya Darpan. Directed by Kumar Shahani (1972). Minding the Gap. Directed by Bing Lu (2018). Mirch Masala. Directed by Ketan Mehta (1987). Mission Kashmir. Directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra (2000). Nishant. Directed by Shyam Benegal (1975). Om Dar-B-Dar. Directed by Kamal Swaroop (1988). Pairon Talle. Directed by Sidharth Srinivasan (2010). Red Desert . Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1964). Screen Tests. Directed by Andy Warhol (1964–1966).

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Still Life. Directed by Jia Zhangke (2006). Straight 8. Directed by Ayisha Abraham (2005). Strike. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1925). Sunday. Directed by Pankaj Advani (1993). Titli. Directed by Kanu Behl (2014). The Tree of Life. Directed by Terrence Malick (2011). Urf Professor. Directed by Pankaj Advani (2001). Ulysses Gaze. Directed by Theo Angelopolous (1995).

CHAPTER 3

Slowing Down

Film festivals as a dispositif in cinema studies scholarship owe their attention to the consolidating efforts of Dina Iordanova, Marijke De Valck, and Skadi Loist, whose essays and book series offer methods and theorizations indispensable to this field.1 Both the poetics and politics of film festivals are their mainstay—from curating to awards—and the search for undiscovered auteurs and extraordinary films drives their reconnaissance energies. These research endeavours have not only multiplied in the digital era—the convenience of Vimeo links and DVD copies have accelerated curatorial programming, as I experience personally when I curate the 3rd i South Asian Film Festival, but have also challenged the dominance of the European film festivals; both the Busan International Film Festival and the Hong Kong International Film Festival have grown in prominence alongside a closer focus on Asian cinemas at Rotterdam, Berlin, Venice, and Toronto.2 What has come to mark the advance publicity of independent films burgeoning worldwide are their premieres at film festivals, online platforms, and forums that were long seen as the dominion of art cinemas, an assumption that has been undercut by the fact that these films have had to contend with jostling on schedules with other practices, from large-scale popular movies to small budget independent films.3 A review of these terms as they emerge across a range of films is in order. ‘Art cinema as institution,’ Steve Neale’s path-breaking essay, drew attention to films outside the influence of commercial Hollywood cinemas, yet not stripped of certain protocols of distribution, format, and © The Author(s) 2020 L. Gopalan, Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54096-8_3

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audiences.4 With detailed case studies of state support in France, Italy, and Germany, Neale’s prognosis persists in the institutions of non-commercial cinemas of India as well, where state subsidies too were guaranteed as a response to the recommendations of the Film Inquiry Committee (1951). Madhava Prasad’s study of government subsidies, initially dispersed under the aegis of the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) and the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) since 1975, bears well to understand the case of non-commercial cinemas from post-independence India right up to liberalization; various nomenclatures for this would include ‘new wave cinemas,’ ‘parallel cinemas,’ and even the ‘avant-garde.’5 If Prasad forewarns of a steady erosion of the Indian state funding for non-commercial cinemas before the era of liberalization in the 1990s, that model of backing independent feature films had already revealed a partiality for script-driven films rather than the more experimental art cinemas that have wandered elsewhere for funding and reception. Ira Bhaskar’s reading of style and preoccupations of new wave films starting in the 1970s leads us to see that the current crop of these films is a far cry from the high-modernist, difficult films supported by FFC in its first incarnation and soon abandoned.6 In the best kind of reception studies research that now dominates a vein of Indian cinema scholarship, Sudha Tiwari’s institutional analysis of the current workings of NFDC tracks the nexus between its own brief and underwriting an international market through designated pitch sessions for independent filmmakers that privilege scriptwriting.7 If some of these directors express alliances with 1970s new cinemas, it rings as nostalgia for an era of manifestos that echoes in the spirit of ‘indie’ films, rather than the radical formalism and endeavours towards a new language of cinema, which course through the strong auteur-driven works that put purchase to the claims of the art of film. Any cursory look at a current festival line-up will reveal a mix of indie style and art cinemas, both bound by the signature of the director as auteur. In the realm of scholarship, the updated evaluation of the history of auteurs in Film Studies and its continuing durability as a critical category belongs to the editors of the anthology The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema (2016).8 Here is Seunghoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski’s pithy declaration that I can easily align myself with9 :

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Cinema is now the most vulnerably attentive, yet active respondent to global capitalism and digital convergence, but unlike other media it also generates [sufficient attention to] auteurs who can sustain critically meaningful or artistically transformative stances.

With a commitment beyond the standard issue European auteurs and American directors, the anthology’s global sweep, notwithstanding the authors’ own reservations about glaring absences of women auteurs, includes Kaushik Bhaumik’s evaluation of Anurag Kashyap’s oeuvre that begins with his arrival and homing in at Cannes, as both director and producer.10 Bhaumik’s narrative of Kashyap as a migrant figure breaking into Mumbai cinema, and claiming the status of auteur through premieres at Cannes, is not the early Kashyap that Ranjani Mazumdar spots in Paanch (2003) and later in No Smoking (2007) nor even the cinephile as part of a collective that I write of in Chapter 4, ‘Bombay Noir.’11 Rather, this later Kashyap is the director whose festival premieres, in advance of theatrical releases in India and globally, endorse his marketability, a tactic that mitigates and circumvents censures issued by the Board of Censors in India. Tracking similar exhibition strategies in films produced in Mumbai, Chennai, Trivandrum, and Ernakulam—however hybrid in their wrought relationship to horror and political dramas—update as neonoir, and feature in my reckoning as ‘dark cinemas.’ Their incursions into the festival calendars of Cannes, Berlinale, Busan, TIFF, Rotterdam, Rome, and Hong Kong—festivals that have programmed Indian films and invited premieres—has no doubt brought critical acclaim and awards, streaming markets, and future global co-productions.12 This is an obvious story of the material conditions of global cinemas, but what needs noting is that curatorial tastes have shifted to consider independent films headed to multiplexes as festival fare expressing immanent forebodings of global capitalism.13 It is this particular move of hedging bets on festival endorsements that has the cadre of indie film directors blossoming with the advent of multiplexes, which marks the trajectory of many of the films and the aspirations of the directors discussed in my chapters. What has become de jure over the years is the realization that festivals are not exclusive protectorates of art cinemas, characterized by their meditation on space and time, that have started to recur in genre cinemas as well. Such recalibration, possible with the affordances of digital technologies, coalesces around Chaitanya Tamhane’s first feature film, Court

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(2014), that rehearses a consideration of duration.14 The film’s substantial spread on Wikipedia serves up an archive rivalling and outpacing a film scholar’s research on its production and reception. The film premiered at the 71st Venice International Film Festival winning the Horizons/Orizzonti award and Tamhane himself was recognized for his debut directorship with the Luigi de Laurentiis award.15 Venice sealed the film’s circulation across the globe and that allure assured its theatrical release in India as well. International film festivals birth auteurs, and it is the mantle of the auteur that directors seek in film festival endorsements that was handily offered to Tamhane; bestowing awards on a rank newcomer to the world of cinema was the persistent tagline across festivals. But there is more to this story of premiering Court in Venice, which was funded by the Hubert Bals Foundation, Rotterdam, in its development stage and may point to the narrative’s appeal at Venice.16 Its subsequent circulation through many film festivals before theatrical release and online presence, classifies Court as a festival film; its style lightly traces on the extant term, ‘art cinema.’ We notice on-screen a detail emphasized by Tamhane—equally emphasized by the cinematographer Mrinal Desai in various interviews—that their film eschews camera movement in favour of static shots, thus, according to them, forwarding an observational style, which Desai was known for from his documentary practice. After a screening in Chennai, Desai offers bare details of the format deployed in this digital work: ‘Shot on Alexa 2K, Prores 4444 with Zeiss Master Primes. Graded on DaVinci Resolve’ and built on visits to courts in Mumbai as well as still photographs.’17 What appears on-screen as we watch the film in a theatre, or currently on streaming platforms, are static shots composed as medium long, long, and extreme long shots as we follow the movement of the protagonists and lean in to hear their voices. In this style, seeking kin with observational documentary through deployment of static shots in such works, Court stages the speed of the trial that implicates the poet and protagonist, Narayan Kamble, in the suicide of a Dalit manhole cleaner/sewer worker. The static shots are of varying lengths and not always tableau style frontal shots: there is occasional recourse to reaction shots during the arguments forwarded by opposing lawyers; in the home lives of the two opposing lawyers; the judge’s family life at a picnic; and Kamble’s own activities as a tutor to children and a poet invested in public performances and publishing activities. Not always, but nevertheless dominant, the frontal static shots

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in and of themselves, and above all, in the sequencing of the narrative, has us shifting between witnessing private lives and observing court procedures. I want to emphasize the line of sequencing that shapes a narrative and draws this film close to the preoccupations of Italian neorealism as in Umberto D (1952), its echoes in the Cuban film La muerte de un burócrata/Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), and later in Girish Kasarvalli’s Kannada film Tabarna Kathe/Tabara’s Tale (1986).18 The presence of non-professional actors alongside trained ones may partly explain its sentimental reception in Venice. Procedural dramas also dominate a strain of contemporary Romanian cinema whose handheld moving cinematography allows for a study of contrast with Court; Tamhane’s own admiration for City of God (2002)—a film celebrated for its rough and low-tech aesthetics shot with a handheld digital camera in crowded favelas—serves up another acknowledged homage from the canon of world cinema in the digital age.19 The static shots composed by Desai recall, for me, Ágnes Peth˝ o’s spotting of the tableau vivant in contemporary Eastern European cinemas as a ‘figure of return.’20 Relying on Brigitte Peucker’s careful reading of tableaux vivants in The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film that enlivens the body by dwelling on paintings in films (Peter Greenway’s A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) among others), Peth˝ o seeks a taxidermist’s approach with her archive: ‘the type of tableau vivant that is, paradoxically, closely connected to the idea of death’ (54).21 Among the films she discusses is Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s The Turin Horse (2011) where: ‘(…) staging through a slow, minimalist narrative and a series of photographic tableaux, how—in reversal of Genesis—the world comes to an end. (…) there is nothing left to chance’ (58).22 I am compelled by Peth˝ o’s twist on Peucker’s reading when trained on The Turin Horse—a film that Tarr would declare as his last to be shot on celluloid—that is committed to long takes.23 In the slightest of comparisons resting on their common resort to static long takes, Court’s own preoccupations land on the side of exposés: the judicial system whose recalcitrant processes delay and throttle justice, a moribund institution, staged frontally at times; a different kind of deadness. Intercepting the judicial procedure at regular intervals are the lives of the protagonists performing routine tasks that unlike the processes at the court are completed in the length of the long takes: Kamble singing; the defence lawyer shopping at an upscale grocery store and dining with parents; the prosecutor cooking, shopping, and on a family outing. Collectively these

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tasks start in medias res and find completion or simply end at the end of the take, which are of varying lengths. These extracurricular routines convey a spatial distance from the court room and, recorded to their completion, exacerbate the drawn-out judicial process that does little to deliver justice for Kamble, whom the film places towards the end with yet another police arrest. The film reserves the private life of the judge, who stalls the case with various kinds of idiosyncratic rulings, for the last segment. Scenes of a large extended picnic with family and friends has the judge playing patriarch to form, yet it is the gaggle of unruly kids who noisily arouse him from his afternoon nap that seems like a belated wake-up call, which would have been put to greater service in the court process. That Court deploys the long take to record the slowness of the judicial process, relays the endurance of those consigned to ‘the margins of the state,’ a concept I borrow from the anthropologist and philosopher Veena Das.24 In mutually informing impulses, observational documentary in the digital era and ethnographies in the age of globalization write of precarity in a liberal state bureaucracy that has abandoned many on the margins. Tamhane’s film adopts static shots of varying lengths across the film to alternatively have us endure the unfair deliverance of judgement in the charges against Kamble, on the one hand, and on the other, squirm and bewilder at how the other protagonists accomplish, with ease, their quotidian.25 If my summary conveys a comparison of incommensurables, then that is how the film persuades us to consider the vast evacuation of routine tasks that Kamble foregoes upon facing charges of incitement against him; class and caste inequalities writ large in a democracy that has failed him. In this bind of viewing, Court leads us to shift framings: from a consideration of the film’s static shots, which evoke the language of the long take, to the opening up to discourses of slow philosophy, whose ascendancy coincides with the arrival of digital speed.26 Ira Jaffe’s Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action offers one encounter with the measurement of different kinds of slowness in films, an archive that we can see has been inflected by festival premieres.27 Jaffe’s ‘wait time,’ one among many classifications, arrives with an emphatic homage, in my reckoning, of a ‘cinema of waiting’ that I detect in films from different locations in India centring on Court. With a coincidental publication date, Song Hwee Lim’s Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness draws attention to gradations of stillness in the director’s works that contends and pushes the boundaries of the long take with

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the advent of digital cinema, whose pressures on timing are no longer tied to the materiality of the celluloid reel.28 Lim’s philosophizing moves the discussion of the long take as a stretched arc that sweeps from European auteurs and towards contemporary Asian cinemas, where it thrives in a range of film practices that push the limits of duration with continual access to digital technologies. For instance, a popular film director working in Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil, and Telegu films, Priyadarshan, ventures onto a small budget Tamil film, Sila Samyangalil/Sometimes (2018), that has us cooling our heels with patients in a waiting room of a medical laboratory, waiting for the results of serological tests in the diagnosis of HIV. The gripping drama of watching the minutest of gestures in a ‘restricted space,’ arrives through the sequencing of static shots.29 From yet another film culture, Dileesh Pothan’s Malayalam film Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum/The Mainour and the Witness (2017) trains its camera on aspects of investigative procedures in a police station to offer a deliberation that veers towards comedy, a film that also relies on the dominance of frontal and medium length shots. In these films, the static shot, at times tableau vivant compositions, relay the recalcitrant workings of the state apparatus at the local level—the theatre of bureaucracy. We as viewers endure lumbering procedures, which provide the narrative drive for these films, the profilmic already committed to a timetable—time of the judicial process, time of police investigations—that the camera records with additions and subtractions so as to mount a coincidence in their respective dispositifs. Together, it allows us to accept the term ‘observational documentary’ while noting that Anand Patwardhan’s political documentary Jai Bhim Comrade (2011) was admittedly an inspiration for the dramatization of Kamble’s character. Notwithstanding the roar of publicity that Court received at film festivals, starting with early support from Hubert Bals Foundation for ‘conveying local culture,’ that has inflected my own reading of its sequencing so far, repeat viewings and my slow engagement with the film’s steady mounting of fiction reveals itself when I am attuned to its soundtrack.30 With the bolt of association that hits cinephiles, I realize that Michel Chion’s reading of Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), aptly titled ‘Without Music,’ resonates in this reading of Tamhane’s film.31 In those long scenes shot in a packed courtroom, we see in the far-ground stragglers loitering under verandas, defenders rising, and the judge in his robes shifting in his chair, yet we hear none of these sounds. We are strictly

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directed to hear the dialogue, divorced from the hubbub of ambient sounds. This expunging of sounds, save dialogue, reserved for the judicial room, delivers as an acute commitment to the pedagogy that drains the world from it, following Chion. In effect, such encasement has me return to Peth˝ o’s suggestion that ‘nothing is left to chance’ in Béla Tarr’s film, but to suggest a reverse effect here: capriciousness fills the judicial process of the lower sessions courts in India, as Court directs us to see, leaving no chance for those living on the margins to get a fair hearing. Inadvertently, with this sound design, Tamhane’s practice is closer to art cinemas’ meditation on the relationship between sound and image, which blows into a world that has little affinity with indexicality—the hallmark of the observational documentary.32 A related preoccupation with the measuring of time, or time as timetables in pro-filmic structures, appears in another film that was released as a sidebar to the 71st Venice Film Festival (The Venice Days Festival, September 2, 2014): Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Asha Jaoar Majhe/Labour of Love (2014). Giving dialogue a miss, since the married couple’s work schedules are polarized opposites—night and day shifts—they never meet. Such missed encounters produce a sadness that the soundtrack accentuates, recalling a motif of melodrama that we know from the language of sound cinema. The film studiously holds back any chance of union— with distended attention to the solitariness damning each half of the couple, who together are conscripted into the 24-hour work cycle of global capitalism—that recalls call centre films.33 Tamhane expressed intentions in interviews to distance his film from the language of Mumbai’s commercial cinemas. Court’s drama of the lower courts in Mumbai with its own peaks, resolutions, and reprises, nevertheless recalls the pace of that cinema. Rather than the slowness advocated by the ‘slow movement,’ the film evokes a sensation of agitation in me, while watching the long-drawn-out, often inane, procedures; time in and of cinema given the short shrift.34 To borrow and rely on the time of the state’s dispositive as performed in the lower courts does heighten the tempo of cause and effect movement in this film, a hallmark of commercial films. In Sengupta’s film, the sustained look at missed encounters and work offers a critique of the day job, yet the perceived slowness of the film does not reveal the ennui of domestic labour: Who cooked the fish left on the countertop and the one in the refrigerator?35 These experiments with measuring and distending time characterize the roster of film festivals since the late 1990s, hybrid practices that

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embrace both the kinetic energies of commercial cinemas and the austerity of post-war art cinemas. For instance, though years separate them, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) is as much a legitimate festival entry as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin (2015) that reworks the wuxia genre. More recently, Bi Gan’s adoption of a languid and aleatory structure partitioned into 2D and 3D recalls a gangster film, despite the fragments, in his Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018). Similarly, both of these festival films from India offer a sustained look at work, its drudgery draining of justice and human contact. There is no doubt that such narratives offer a critique of global capitalism, yet I am moved by John David Rhodes’ call for something more radical in his reading of art cinema’s fascination with work that I want to echo here to suggest other possibilities, other ventures36 : Recognizing labour, representing it, drawing attention to its obscured modalities, with however much care and attention, while certainly laudable projects, do not intervene in the process of value production for capital: we do not need to demystify capital, but rather to destroy it. The task, instead, is to reimagine our world and our ways of living in it, to refuse the premise that how well or how much we work will offer the means by which we measure our worth. Our job, if we still want to employ that term, is to discover ways of being that are measureless and therefore without value.

What would such a cinema look like? Here, I want to consider the film and philosophical discussions that infuse film schools, which, in the best of worlds, do suspend a consideration of end goals. No discussion of film festivals, in the realm of loitering or in the direction of duration, will be possible without acknowledging the central role that film schools have played in cultivating and graduating a culture of auteurs steeped in world cinema practices and their own ascendancy alongside their classmates trained in all aspects of filmmaking: cinematography, editing, sound design, and more as we move into digital pedagogy.37 At the centre of their pedagogy at FTII, for instance, are legendary teachers, august filmmakers of the Indian new wave, and internationally acknowledged art cinema directors whose philosophizing of cinema as a medium about duration bears imprints on their students who also double as assistants. I want to call attention to the central role that weekly exercises and end of term projects in short format at film schools not

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only hone skills, but also allow for the exploration of possibilities and affordances of the medium. The daily practice as being paramount to the life of the artist was expressed by the filmmaker Mani Kaul as an ethic for his daily musical practice on the sarod that his students embraced.38 One wonders if Kaul had had an extensive access to digital profligacy with unimaginable shooting ratios in contrast to analogue cinema’s burdens of both rationing and minding the costs of processing, would his daily practice have also included digital shooting itself?39 Leaving aside hypothetical scenarios without posthumous outcomes, we know from his own writings, anecdotes from students and mentees— both oral and published—the film theoretical practice associated with Mani Kaul places sound central to cinema and the image itself as a figuration of time, lessons most forcefully conveyed to younger filmmakers who entered his orbit as students and fellow travellers.40 There have been at least two generation of students that I have had conversations with on his practice and one throwaway remark that emerges from the practice of daily filmmaking is the courage to embrace mistakes as a mark of one’s style; practice not replication.41 By conjoining various anecdotes I have been privy to over the years, I want to consider Kaul’s lesson or at least one attributed to him that echoes in the classroom and studios of film schools as one confronting contingency, from film shoots to life.42 In the most mundane of translations, the best arranged film shoot based off storyboarding can implode and in the hands of the true artist moulded into her film. A further corollary is to tempt fate and shake off the scaffolding of script and genre. All of these are less abstract when seeing Kaul being evoked explicitly or implicitly in the films of FTII auteurs well into the move from analogue to digital. In Kaul’s last years, he kept company with Gurvinder Singh—a mentorship is how the younger filmmaker names it—and his presence is evident in the latter’s meditations on his own filmmaking, a cinema committed to duration, slowness being one such effect. With international funding, including grants from the Hubert Bals Foundation, and festival premiers at Venice, Toronto, Busan, and Cannes, Singh is a recognizable global auteur. With his recent Khanaur/Bitter Chestnut (2019), Singh’s feature films (the non-fiction works demand a different framing, short form is a provisional difference) have taken on the omnibus structure of a trilogy of films on Punjab in 1984, completing earlier works Anhe Ghore da Dhan/Alms for a Blind Horse (2011) and Chauthi Koot/The Fourth

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Direction (2015). Drenching Anhe Ghore Da Dhan/Alms for a Blind Horse with darkness, Singh overtly rewrites Kaul’s own first feature film Uski Roti (1970) that ends with a night scene but otherwise has us captive in a narrative of vigil in broad daylight. Ira Bhaskar and Anuja Jain have teased out Singh’s rewriting of Kaul’s stillness, which has a way of stirring movement in the other’s first film that, at the time, bore the characteristic weightiness of ‘new cinemas’ and its commitment to experiments in the 1970s.43 Drawing in the night air of mist and fog, the narrative of waiting in Singh’s first feature prolongs the unit of time with an undecipherable passage through the night. With the first feature premiering at Venice, Gurvinder Singh’s second feature Chauthi Koot premiered at Cannes, confirming his currency as a film festival auteur. In this film we are back in 1984, a Punjab wrecked by ongoing antagonisms between India’s state militarism and Sikh militants’ claims on a separate state that lead up to one watershed event with the assassination of the prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, by her own security detail. That, in turn, sets off a rash of vengeance killing of Sikhs in Delhi and across India.44 All of these events are stated in the opening title card. The film opens inside a bus carriage in the early evening hours; we follow the first two protagonists on a hurried walk that has the imprint of digital editing with dropped frames, and finally we are out into the night air of October or November at a railway station, Firozpur Cantonment. Cloaked in the dark atmosphere of steaming teas and armed soldiers, the plight of the first two men seeking travel to Amritsar seems doomed, as conveyed through the slim dialogue; the lingering camera absorbs the blackness of night as their plaintive requests are accompanied by an atmosphere of foreboding. Eventually, propelling themselves on a departing empty train, the protagonists are locked in a compartment with others in a similar plight: turbaned men identifiable as Sikhs and others, presumably Hindus. We experience an ambience of paranoia that the narrative expresses unrelentingly, even as the film takes a roundabout through a long section, most of the film being set in a home amidst the fields of Punjab. Here again, nights are broken by sudden dog barks, militants’ intrusions, and travellers lost in the darkness, and it is the night that is reserved for stealth outings and lost tracks. When day breaks, routines are punctuated by the random arrival of army soldiers on a reconnaissance mission. Intermittently, the camera records the morning fog, which barely outlines human figures and buffaloes. In a lengthy segment between events at this home, we watch from a window and terrace, winds blowing

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Fig. 3.1 Rains across wheat fields (Courtesy Gurvinder Singh)

Fig. 3.2 Walking in the fog (Courtesy Gurvinder Singh)

over verdant fields of wheat, clouds gathering force, and slow-moving rain showers (Figs. 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3). There is no measurement of time, nor dialogue to indicate the coming of rain showers, nor how long we have been observing the swaying tall wheat grass—rather we witness the shape of contingency whose tempo

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Fig. 3.3 Gurvinder Singh with cinematographer Nagpaul in the train compartment (Courtesy Gurvinder Singh)

best expresses itself in these elements. As the title indicates, a fourth direction is called for: not the train to Amritsar, not the untimely arrival of militants, not the walk westwards, but due east, for the family lost in the dark, in the fog of night where figures can pass for one another. The film closes with the passengers slipping out of a slowing train onto the fields, it is pitch dark. As our first protagonists run, they are called on by their fellow passengers, three Sikh men who ask for their protection from the two Hindus lest they be gunned down by the army. Camouflaged by the two Hindu men and the night’s darkness, the men walk together, and the film closes on this formation of a community. Embracing the night fog as the device that blurs communal differences, the film offers us a way of imagining immanent bonds between communities, between humans, that we slowly begin to decipher in its contours, post pogroms. In this narrative of engulfing paranoia whipped up by a state of siege across day and night, there are breakouts into elements that appear here as happenstance in the pro-filmic that no film shoot can imagine and has to contend with routinely. Of course, drawing on the elemental, Chauthi

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Koot follows upon a long genealogy that takes us to fogs in Mizoguchi, rivers in Ghatak, and ‘sunny skies in Ozu.’45 In the adjacent cinema, rain and fog machines produce sequences of rushing waterfalls and heavy rains that ratchet the sensation of passion in popular Indian cinema, my ‘cinema of interruptions.’ Yet, its specific expression in Chauthi Koot mitigates the cloak of despair with sudden cloud bursts and rolling fog. Here, the darkness of night has protagonists losing their trail to a village, as it happens early in the narrative, but also obscures the marker of ethnic and communal identity at the end. In the depths of night, by pushing the digital sensors, cinematographer Satya Rai Nagpaul mixes blacks and blues and draws us into an image of ‘eco-cinema’ (echoing Scott MacDonald’s pioneering formulation), in which the shape of contingency finds its fullest expression and offers an exploration of duration other than the one dictated by the socio-political drama.46 Avoiding and courting elements brings out the anecdotal in FTII cinematographers for whom chance and accident, both forms of contingency, narrate their practice in hindsight; Sashikanth Ananthachari directs me to Satyajit Ray’s narrative of shooting Kanchenjungha (1962) in Darjeeling.47 Subrata Mitra, the legendary cinematographer, would wait for the mists and fog to roll onto their set before rolling his own camera to deliver an intriguing narrative.48 Not far from here, also in Darjeeling, Fali Mistry, the cinematographer shooting the Hindi commercial film Ek Musafir Ek Hasina (1962), would wait for the fog to burn before shooting his film stars in the clear light of day! From his own practice of shooting the elements, Ananthachari narrates an assignment that was beset with accidents. He was the cinematographer on Rahat Yusufi’s Pratikriya (1990), a project commissioned by the Films Division that was set in the drought blight of Kalahandi district of Orissa. Ananthachari had forewarned Yusufi that rains chased him at every shoot, and there was a good possibility that this may not be a drought film after all. Dismissing his cinematographer’s superstition, Yusufi launched his shoot and on the first day, the dry cracked landscape opened to the baking sun was soon covered by clouds and hit by rain. Rain showers persisted despite the local residents assuring the team that it was most unusual. It was the time of analogue, and the sound recordist was close at hand for the entire shoot; Ananthachari says that you can hear the pounding rain on the soundtrack of a drought film since at that time even the best of sound equalizers could not tame such ambient recordings, a

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claim that did not dim the prestige of winning the 38th National Award for the Best Environment Film. The credit for actively courting rains also belongs to Shaji Kuran’s Piravi (1989), shot by the aptly named cinematographer, Sunny Joseph, a film that figures in Chapter 6, ‘Road Movie.’ At this shoot, Joseph would wait for the full force of monsoon showers to capture glistening wet surfaces and surging rivers for a film also about waiting. This anecdote arrived from K.U. Mohanan who has had his own share of adventures with rains while shooting a short fiction Kannada film, part of the anthology Aidondla Aidu (2011) set in Madikeri, Coorg, and based on a short story. The director wanted the shoot to begin in December, the dry season, and decided to hire rain machines to replicate the monsoon ambience. Mohanan, who had started off as a documentary filmmaker, decided against the artificial studio device and asked for a schedule during the monsoons. The four-day shoot in July was more than he had bargained for, ‘It was raining cats and dogs’; temperatures had dropped and the set of a thatched hut was flooded. Mohanan recalls wading in waist-high waters to shoot the actors whose chattering teeth added a naturalism to the shots of shadows and silhouettes offered by monsoon light that no rain machine can deliver. It is a narrative about a deadbeat husband and hardworking wife, a short film exploring duration of labour as gendered temporality. With the arrival of smaller digital cameras, shooting in rains does not run the risk of electrocution. Yet, as Aadish Keluskar’s Kaul —A Calling (2016) shows, lighting strikes are electrifying. Piyush Shah identifies Kaul as a film executed on a laptop and that is how I received my first intimations of the film. Keluskar and I struck up a passing acquaintance during my research summers at FTII, and in Fall 2015, I received a note from him asking me to look at his film and suggest possible venues for its screening. It was a Vimeo link that credited Dolby digital and a title card declared ‘this film is not yet rated.’ We selected Kaul as part of the 3rd i South Asian Film Festival’s line-up that had the film projected large at the Castro Theatre. I saw the film again at PVR Cinemas in Juhu on a rain-drenched day with filmmaker, Nishtha Jain, in July 2017, a reserved slot for festival films called Director’s Cut. My favourite screening was in downtown Thane in November 2018 at a single-theatre multiplex that was reserved for a late evening of film. It was a crowdfunded screening that had been initiated on social media by fans who knew the film had had no theatrical release, though Keluskar’s sweet romantic film Jaoon

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Kahan Bata Ae Dil (2018) had opened at JioMAMI earlier that year. The screening, organized by aspiring self-taught filmmakers, was followed by a Q&A with the director. After the projectionist urged us out of the theatre, the conversation continued for another hour in parking lots lined with two-wheelers. Keluskar was attentive and encouraging, after all, he had made his film with seven lakh rupees borrowed from his mother. It was clear that night that Keluskar was an auteur in the resurgence of Marathi independent cinema, a minor cinema, deserving of ongoing festival encomiums starting with Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry/ Pig (2013).49 To watch Kaul again on the streaming platform, Amazon Prime, is to note the passage of the film through different financial institutions that stepped up at the distribution end of the film. To watch it while sheltering at home during the global coronavirus pandemic and while teaching online at UT Austin, Kaul seems uncannily prescient. How can I not see Keluskar’s work as an eco-horror film whose slow burn of a narrative has us watching heavy rainclouds moving across the sky, thick sheets of rain thrown over the landscape, and low-resolution images blurring figures on-screen. I had to slow down to discern figures and decipher an opaque narrative where plot and story are in tandem; an aleatory crime narrative offers one string to hold onto through a distended cause and effect sequencing. A school teacher has decamped from Mumbai to a village in Ratnagiri district. The key moment I return to is the so-called supernatural experience touted in the program notes at festivals and available online. Unlike the sequencing that structures the rest of the film that is calculated to complicate our viewing by rupturing voice-over to image—discourse on the nature of the universe, energy, and being, the dominion of philosophy—this one gives to us conventional markers of cause and effect, thus revising Christian Metz’s ordinary sequence. We are a little over thirteen minutes into the film. The sequence opens at an evening dinner with colleagues at a restaurant, the school teacher is the focus of the camera. The talk is about a Dashavatara drama that will play later that night to which he is being encouraged to attend because one of his colleagues manages the performance. Duration serves as motif of the conversation. To the teacher’s query, as a newcomer to rural life, ‘Will it last a couple of hours?,’ the answer is that the play will start at midnight and end at daybreak, of course he can come by 11 p.m. to settle in. An odd line, ‘the energy of the performance will run down your spine,’ retrospectively seems like a foreboding directed at the occult.

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Fig. 3.4 Breaking into the day (Video grab)

As the camera scans faces in the audience, we are ushered into the time of the play in progress. Keluskar’s instructions to me to watch his work with a pair of headphones, or avail myself of a good sound system, serves a purpose here as theatrical dialogue competes with the patter of monsoon rains that we can hear thudding on a hard surface. The dialogue itself turns to questions of chance and virtue: ‘if you are a virtuous wife. your house will be saved from being burnt to ashes.’ This is the stuff of epics, and Dashavatara, an epic of Vishnu’s ten forms, addresses the formation of reincarnation and restoration of cosmic order through fire sacrifices. As spectators attuned to the soundtrack, we are in the world of elements: dialogues about fires and the ‘acoustic indexicality’ of rains (Fig. 3.4).50 From the bright lights of the stage performance, we are engulfed into the blackness of night. Amidst the overcast skies, we see the green and black hues of the Sahyadri range. In a single take, the camera stills on a moving light that moves from the far-ground towards us. Once up close, the teacher’s light shirt, open umbrella, and bicycle outline textures of cloth and metal; the source of light, high up, is a headlight strapped on his head. With little prompting, a shock of white hair enters frame left with a request for a light from an older man. In the falling rain, the two men huddle under the umbrella trying to light a beedi about half a dozen times. Upon the final light and burn, the old man ventures an ancillary query: ‘What time is it?,’ ‘Four,’ answers the teacher balancing himself while switching objects to read the wristwatch strapped on his right arm. The old man saunters off towards screen right and the camera follows him; his white t-shirt gleams brightly as it turns into a speck. In

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the distance we can see the first break of day as a horizontal line of greywhite across the skies. As the camera moves leftwards slowly, we are back to the pitch darkness of land, catching the beam of the headlight, and when further left we plunge into darkness. A leftwards swish pan movement of the camera knocks us into broad daylight, producing motion blur. When the camera stabilizes, we see the teacher toppled off his bike and standing in a defensive posture suggesting blocking an attack, lightning, or a gust of wind for instance. Sheets of rain and its patter continue on-screen and on the soundtrack. Watching this single take again and again with access to digital controls, I am siphoned into the world of the film. We learn later in the film that the teacher’s throw has landed him at 3 p.m., eleven hours later into the day. To slow down, which we can indeed do as Laura Mulvey reminds us with digital video controls, we see the drama of the elements in the profilmic assume a duration of their own.51 In the single take into darkness, we have passed the school teacher with his headlight and as we plunge further into darkness and then are shaken by a swish pan leftwards into the brightness of the afternoon. What we behold in this one take, not a long take, is not only the flooding of daylight but also the rearrangement of the teacher on-screen when the camera steadies itself. As far as the apparatus goes, such in-camera effects were available in early cinema through stopmotion techniques. Since then, film shoots have often extended working hours or compensate for lost time by resorting to day for night shoots when the darkening of the set would suffice to mount the nocturnal. But this is not just about detecting the work of trick effects, rather I propose that it is Keluskar exploring the dispositive for the image as folds in time and space. When we acquiesce to the world of the film, either the teacher has been shuffled forward by a force that allows the camera to record the extraordinary drama of the elements, or a pleat in space has left the teacher standing in the same spot and standing still; we fold forward to the bright light of 3 p.m. To evoke Hamlet seems fitting here—the line that Derrida would parse on spectres and that Philip K. Dick would poach for a dystopian spin: ‘the time is out of joint.’52 The rest of the film unfolds as a puzzle. We piece together a crime procedural, the teacher’s psychological distress, his strained marriage, and the old man’s philosophizing on the nature of the universe while levitating on a green slope. Additionally, amplifying the effect of non-sequiturs, the film queues the following: shots of bats and a long take that moves along a passageway with a man reposing in a dank room next to a high pile of

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garbage. If the crimes committed are horrifying in a psychological drama, these moments in the film infuse horrors of ecological degradation whose magnitude is viscerally conveyed through a dynamic folding and pleating of both time and space, the purview of cinema we know from Deleuze via Bergson. One of my queries to Keluskar following the screening in Thane, was to discern the particular sweet intonation of the Marathi accent in the film. ‘We had a dialogue coach so that the fast-talking Marathi of Ratnagiri would slow down both in speed and decibel,’ he answered. With a commitment to the artifice of acting and accents, Keluskar’s digital film conveys the uncanny at various registers, the evocation of the elemental chief among them. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli’s compelling proposition of ‘the digital uncanny’ to read experimental artworks instructs my own reading here: Kaul immerses us in a virtual world relying on our familiarity with the language of narrative cinema.53 As we pronounce the title, something has to be said of the punning at play: it sounds like the legendary filmmaker and teacher’s surname, Mani Kaul. This is a complicated story of legacies: Aadish Keluskar was too young to have met that particular filmmaker at a master class in FTII, considering that he had dropped out of the institution without completing his Diploma Film, begetting a short circuiting of endings and graduations. Despite his espoused renegade student status, Kaul turns out to be the feature length film that stands in for the Diploma Film and the title, with all the linguistic punning at play, calls on the durational cinema that FTII has long nurtured. A line from Nietzsche opens Aadish Keluskar’s Kaul: The Calling to suggest a different philosophy of cinema where sound and image are wedded as a mark of sanity or not: ‘Those who danced were considered insane by those who couldn’t hear the music.’ To slow down for these films is to seek the pristine ambience of festival schedules or to hunker down with a laptop, since as Gurvinder Singh surmised, ‘theatrical release is a waste, Netflix saved Chauthi Koot.’54 To slow down, to still the image as being provided by a film’s own preoccupation with photography, served as a provocation for Raymond Bellour’s early essay ‘Pensive spectator’ that recognized a dialectical relationship between the film and the viewer during the period when scholars relied on single celluloid screenings.55 Mulvey revises Bellour’s formulation to find possibilities in the digital for unprecedented close readings of a range of moving image works, an action that filmmakers are equally and keenly aware of.56

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In this ongoing dialogue between films, filmmakers, and viewers, difficult works have us absorbed in their time, out of speed and distractions. Such reading strategies of slow discernment course through the chapters of this book, committing to the idea that films chosen for adulation are worthy of the time spent traveling alongside them. At times, the films’ opacity and ambiguity demand our undivided attention and challenge our assumptions of cinema beyond the timetable of film festivals that may have recognized them initially, but their circulation stymied after those premieres. I find myself in the last two chapters of this book, ‘Road Movie’ and ‘Untitled: Amitabh Chakraborty’s Cinema’ in their grip. Both of these chapters offer an absorption in reading, which seems to me the only way to meet the films whose preoccupations are those of the philosophy of cinema: time and space coordinates, sound offering another dimension.57

Notes 1. Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, eds., The Festival Circuit (St Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2009). Dina Iordanova and Ruby Chong, eds., Film Festivals and Imagined Communities (St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies, 2010). Marijke De Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). ———. ‘Supporting Art Cinema at a Time of Commercialisation: Principles and Practices, the Case of the International Film Festival Rotterdam,’ Poetics 42.1 (2014): 40–59. Marijke De Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, eds., Film Festivals History, Theory, Method, Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 2. For an excellent book on a single film festival, Busan International, see Soo Jeong Ahn, Pusan International Film Festival, South Korean Cinema and Globalization (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012). 3. For an early formulation on independent cinemas in America, see Janet Staiger, ‘Individualism Versus Collectivism,’ Screen 24.4–5 (1983): 69–79. 4. Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution,’ Screen 22.1 (1981): 11–39. Steve Neale’s works have a way of framing my own writing at the most opportune of times. I remember his Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), serving as the sharpest, its slimness notwithstanding, writing on genre cinema and always close at hand during the writing of my own Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002).

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5. M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 6. Ira Bhaskar, ‘The Indian New Wave,’ in Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas,, eds. K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 19–33. 7. Sudha Tiwari, ‘From New Cinema to New Indie Cinema: The Story of NFDC and Film Bazaar,’ in Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution, ed. Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram (London: Routledge, 2019), 25–45. 8. Seung-Hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski, eds., The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 9. Seung-Hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski, ‘Introduction,’ in The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1–20; 6. 10. Kaushik Bhaumik, ‘Migration and Contemporary Indian Cinema: A Consideration of Anurag Kashyap and la Politique des Auteurs in the Times of Globalization,’ in The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema, eds. Seung-Hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 287–392. 11. Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). ———. ‘Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema,’ in Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010), 150–86. 12. For a good reference that consolidates extant reportage and on-theground reporting in a book-length study, see Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram, India’s New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid (New York: Routledge, 2016). 13. Consideration of auteur signatures dominated my own work with detailed studies of J.P. Dutta, Mani Ratnam, Ramgopal Varma, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra among others in Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. In the monograph on Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (London: BFI Publishing, 2005), I noted how the circulation to film festivals was after a release of the film in the national markets; a shortened festival version without song and dance sequences was how that film fared. 14. In hindsight, Venice in particular, and most film festivals in general, are rendezvous points for friendships between directors across the globe (their market agenda of such gathering dominates daily reporting). I imagine it would have to be the setting where he met Alfonso Cuarón the following

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year, when the latter was the chair of the jury for the 72nd Venice International, which may have sealed the Rolex Mentor Protégé Program. Cuarón’s return to the Mexico of his childhood, mounted in Roma (2018), was the film shoot that served as Tamhane’s observational pedagogy, the very skills that he himself deployed as the language for his first long feature film Court. It was on the sets of Roma whose narrative of accounting for the point of view of domestic labour that offers another way to consider duration of work on-screen. For the most comprehensive evaluation of Venice and Cannes as barometers of taste, see Tricia Jenkins, International Film Festivals: Contemporary Cultures and History Beyond Venice and Cannes (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018). For a careful reading of the history and practice of Hubert Bals Funds, see Miriam Ross, ‘The Film Festival as Producer: Latin American Films and Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund,’ Screen 52.2 (Summer 2011): 261–67. Miramax campaigns at the Golden Globe and Oscars have permanently coloured any notion of merits and quality of a film as being the only criteria; and that juries can be influenced in various ways is now regarded cynically as standard protocol. Additionally, roving curators and representatives from India to world film festivals are seen as gatekeepers with undue influence early in the process that can often stymie a film’s release. The film itself, it appears, in the time of screening excess has to hold the attention of the curators in the first few minutes, whose runs from one airport to another film festival, has them watching over cell phone screens, DVD players, laptops, etc. Even long feature films, very long feature films, have faced broken continuity viewing time in the hands of the very curators who have campaigned for their festival screening. I have heard such stories and confessions from filmmakers and curators over the years recounting their success, disappointment, and frustration of the passage of works into a line-up at a festival. Detail obtained from https://studentfilmer.com/2015/05/04/interv iew-with-mrinal-desai-cinematographer-of-internationally-acclaimed-court (accessed November 2019). M. Madhava Prasad, ‘Ghatashraddha,’ in The Cinema of India, ed. Lalitha Gopalan. (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), 17–179. For a stunning reading of Romanian cinema, see Dominique Nasta, Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle (London: Wallflower Press, 2013). Ágnes Peth˝ o, ‘The Tableau Vivant as a ‘Figure of Return’ in Contemporary East European Cinema,’ Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies 9.1 (2014): 51–76. Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007).

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Peth˝ o credits the reading of death in tableau vivant to Aura Satz, ‘Tableaux Vivants: Inside the Statue,’ in Articulate Objects: Voice, Sculpture, and Performance, eds. Aura Satz and Jon Woods (Oxford/New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 157–83. Peth˝ o, ‘The Tableau Vivant,’ 58. 30 long takes! The earliest reference I can locate to this accounting besides my obsession with the film is to Jonathan Romney’s review that the Wikipedia entry on the film cites: ‘The Turin Horse,’ Screen Dail y, 15 February 2011. There is more to be said of winds blowing across the landscape coupled with the isolation of the father and daughter that produces what Tarr has referred to as the ‘heaviness and darkness of the film’ that doubles on Peth˝ o’s reading as well. Veena Das, ‘The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility,’ in Anthropology in the Margins of the State, eds. Veena Das and Deborah Pool (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004), 225–52. Also see the splendid introduction to the volume: Veena Das and Deborah Poole, ‘State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies,’ 3–34. For another meticulous ethnography that has shaped my thinking, see Akhil Gupta, Red Tape Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). For a revisionist enterprise of observational and ethnographic filmmaking, see works produced at the Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. A purview into that practice, particularly that of Lucien Taylor, see Scott Macdonald, ‘Conversations on the Avant-Doc: Scott MacDonald Interviews,’ Framework 54.2 (2013): 259–330. Slow philosophy as gastronomical intervention begins with Carlo Petrini’s slow food movement in the 1980s as a strident stand against the global spread of fast food, particularly McDonalds. I am indebted to the following books for their careful exposition of slow philosophy that fuel my thinking: Lutz P Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). For a feminist reframing of these issues, I am grateful to Sangeeta Ray for directing me to Michelle Boulous Walker, Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). For the most comprehensive anthology on the long take and close readings, see John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, eds., The Long Take: Critical Approaches (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Ira Jaffe, Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2014). Song Hwee Lim, Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014).

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29. For the formulation of cinema of restricted space, see Steven Ungar, Cléo de 5 à 7 (London: BFI Publishing, 2008). 30. Marijke de Valck, ‘Supporting Art Cinema at a Time of Commercialization: Principles and Practices, the Case of the International Film Festival Rotterdam,’ Poetics 42.1 (2014): 40–59. 31. Michel Chion, ‘Without Music: On Caché,’ in A Companion to Michael Haneke, ed. Roy Grundman (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 161–67. 32. Since we live in the age of blogs, tweets, and social media, I would be remiss if I did not mention a dissenting voice pointing to the upper caste prejudices of the film: Yogesh Maitreya, ‘A critique of Court and the Brahmin agency behind it,’ Roundtable India: For an Informed Ambedkar Age, 15 May 2015 (accessed April 2, 2020). 33. Sengupta’s second film, Jonaki (2018), bears an uncanny resemblance to Suma Jossan’s Janmadinam; modernist preoccupations with non-linear narrative in the age of digital. For call center films, see Dale Hudson, ‘Undesirable Bodies and Desirable Labor: Documenting the Globalization and Digitization of Transnational American Dreams in Indian Call Centers,’ Cinema Journal xlix.1 (2009): 82–102. 34. A footnote is due on the functioning of bureaucracies and democracy that Jaffe forwards in an engagement with Sylviane Agacinski: She links slow time not just to thinking, or to pleasure and physical health, important though these things are, but principally to the survival of democracy, to what I would term “slow politics.” (Jaffe, 8) Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Jaffe and Agacinski’s perspectives derive from their experience with liberal democracies of the west whereas Das and Gupta limit such reification of the Indian State by drawing attention to the attending, through slow ethnography if I will editorialize, to the workings of the state apparatus in the daily lives of its citizens. 35. For the canonical work on domestic labour as long take, I join legions of cinephiles to recognize the ur-text: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). 36. John Rhodes, ‘Art Cinema’s Immaterial Labors,’ Diacritics 46.4 (2018): 96–116; 110. 37. My deep commitment to film school curriculum is a daily practice with my own students and for the world outside, a first offering attached to a longer period of research on FTII Diploma films is available as Lalitha

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Gopalan, ‘The Enchanted Worlds of the FTII Diploma Films,’ Screen 58.1 (2017): 90–97. These references are from V¯ajapey¯ı, Udayana, and Gurvinder Singh, Uncloven Space: Mani Kaul in Conversation with Udayan Vajpeyi, trans. Gurvinder Singh (Hyderabad: Quiver, 2013). I pose this with considerable disingenuousness. On my end, when given the opportunity with my own filmmaker students I have advocated for a total detox from lens-based practices for at least a year given the excess of cellphone images that they produce. Mani Kaul’s written and transcribed work on sound may be slim, but ought to be read alongside his films that have stretched the idea to place it centrally to his declaration that cinema is not image alone. See Mani Kaul, ‘The Rambling Figure,’ in Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures, 1998–2001, eds. Larry Sider, Diane Freeman, and Jerry Sider (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 209–20. Also see a riveting collection of conversations with Mani Kaul published posthumously: Udayana V¯ajapey¯ı and Gurvinder Singh, Uncloven Space: Mani Kaul in Conversation with Udayan Vajpeyi. Translated by Gurvinder Singh. Hyderabad: Quiver, 2013. My own forays into Mani Kaul’s films total two conference presentations on his Siddheshwari: ‘The New Documentary in India,’ Society of Cinema Studies Conference, New York, March 1995. ‘Sound and Editing in Mani Kaul’s Siddheshwari,’ Asian Studies Association Meeting, Boston, March 1994. This one emerged in my conversation with Ranjan Palit, May 2011. Also see Kaul’s discussion on how the Dhrupad style of Hindustani music that he has long practised serves as meditation on his film practice as well: Mani Kaul, ‘The Rambling Figure,’ in Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures, 1998–2001, eds. Larry Sider, Diane Freeman, and Jerry Sider (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 209–20. I have to acknowledge however opaque and distant it seems the strong influence of Catherine Malabou’s Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012). Ira Bhaskar, ‘The Indian New Wave,’ in Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, eds. K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 19–34. Anuja Jain, ‘Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan: The Politics and Legacies of the New Wave Movement in Contemporary Indian Cinema,’ in Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution, ed. Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram (New York: Routledge, 2019), 11–24.

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44. In addition to a large number of civil liberties organization of the massacres against the Sikhs, the State’s own assessment and culpability is recorded in what is known as the Nanavati Commission 2005. 45. How could I not sneak in an essay about one of my favorite writers on films: Hasumi Shigehiko, ‘Sunny Skies,’ in Ozu’s Tokyo Story, ed. David Desser (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 118–30. 46. Scott MacDonald, ‘Toward an Eco-Cinema,’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11.2 (2004): 107–32. 47. The relevant quote is Andrew Robinson’s: ‘The idea was to have the film starting with sunlight. Then clouds coming, then mist rising, and then mist disappearing, the cloud disappearing, and the sun shining on the snow-peaks. There is an independent progression to Nature itself, and the story reflects this.’ In Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (London: Deutsch, 1989), 141. 48. Of course, a must read is Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1976). 49. Amrit Gangar, ‘Marathi Cinema: The Exile, Factory, and Fame,’ in Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, eds. K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake. Editorial Assistant Rohit K. Dasgupta. (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2013). Suraj Yengde, ‘Dalit Cinema.’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41.3 (2018), 503–18. 50. I am borrowing and referring to Michael Renov’s concept of ‘acoustic indexicality’ that offers a splendid resonance here. Michael Renov, ‘Toward a Poetics of Documentary,’ in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 12–36. 51. Laura Mulvey, Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 52. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2007). 53. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, ‘The Digital Uncanny and Ghost Effects,’ Screen 57.1 (2016): 1–20. 54. HT Correspondent, ‘Theatrical release is a waste,’ Hindustan Times, Chandigarh, November 11, 2017 (accessed April 15, 2020). 55. Raymond Bellour, ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory,’ in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, eds. Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöhler (Vienna: SYNEMA Publikationen, 2012), 9–21. 56. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. 57. Somewhere on the internet floats a line allegedly from Stanley Kubrick to Nicole Kidman: ‘what is gold in filmmaking: time.’ Florence Trott, ‘The cult of Stanley Kubrick: subversion, sci-fi, and control,’ The Face, June

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25th, 2019.https://theface.com/culture/the-cult-of-stanley-kubrick-sub version-sci-fi-and-control.

Bibliography Agacinski, Sylviane. Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia. Translated by Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Ahn, Soo-Jeong. Pusan International Film Festival, South Korean Cinema and Globalization. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory.’ In Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, edited by Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöhler, 9–21. Vienna: SYNEMA Publikationen, 2012. Bhaskar, Ira. ‘The Indian New Wave.’ In Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, edited by K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, 19–34. London: Routledge, 2013. Bhaumik, Kaushik. ‘Migration and Contemporary Indian Cinema: A Consideration of Anurag Kashyap and La Politique des Auteurs in the Times of Globalization.’ In The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema, edited by Seung-Hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski, 287–302. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Chion, Michel. ‘Without Music: On Caché.’ In A Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundman, 161–67. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Das, Veena. ‘The Signature of the State: the Paradox of Illegibility.’ In Anthropology in the Margins of the State, edited by Veena Das and Deborah Poole, 225–52. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004. Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole. ‘State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies.’ In Anthropology in the Margins of the State, edited by Veena Das and Deborah Poole, 3–34. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 2007. De Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. ———. ‘Supporting Art Cinema at a Time of Commercialisation: Principles and Practices, the Case of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.’ Poetics 42.1 (2014): 40–59. De Valck, Marijke, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, eds. Film Festivals History, Theory, Method, Practice. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Devasundaram, Ashvin Immanuel. India’s New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid. New York: Routledge, 2016.

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Gangar, Amrit. ‘Marathi Cinema: the Exile, Factory, and Fame.’ In Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, edited by K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, 72–87. London: Routledge, 2013. Gibbs, John, and Douglas Pye, eds. The Long Take Critical Approaches. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Gopalan, Lalitha. ‘Sound and Editing in Mani Kaul’s Siddheshwari.’ Asian Studies Association Meeting, Boston, March 1994. ———. ‘Siddheshwari: The New Documentary in India.’ Society of Cinema Studies Conference, New York, March 1995. ———. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 2002. ———. Bombay. London: BFI Publishing, 2005. ———. ‘The Enchanted Worlds of the FTII Diploma Films.’ Screen 58.1 (2017): 90–97. Gupta, Akhil. Red Tape Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Hudson, Dale, and Ashim Ahluwalia. ‘Undesirable Bodies and Desirable Labor: Documenting the Globalization and Digitization of Transnational American Dreams in Indian Call Centers.’ Cinema Journal xlix.1 (2009): 82–102. Iordanova, Dina and Ragan Rhyne, eds. The Festival Circuit. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2009. Jaffe, Ira. Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action. London: Wallflower Press, 2014. Jain, Anuja. ‘Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan: The Politics and Legacies of the New Wave Movement in Contemporary Indian Cinema.’ In Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution, edited by Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram, 11–24. New York: Routledge, 2019. Jenkins, Tricia. International Film Festivals: Contemporary Cultures and History Beyond Venice and Cannes. London: I.B. Tauris, 2018. Jeong, Seung-Hoon, and Jeremi Szaniawski, eds. The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Kaul, Mani. ‘The Rambling Figure.’ In Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures, 1998–2001, edited by Larry Sider, Diane Freeman, and Jerry Sider, 209–20. London: Wallflower Press, 2003. Koepnick, Lutz P. On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Lim, Song Hwee. Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. Macdonald, Scott. ‘Conversations on the Avant-Doc: Scott MacDonald Interviews.’ Framework 54.2 (2013): 259–330.

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MacDonald, Scott. ‘Toward an Eco-Cinema.’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11.2 (2004): 107–32. Maitreya, Yogesh. ‘A Critique of Court and the Brahmin agency Behind I.’ Roundtable India: For an Informed Ambedkar Age, May 15, 2015 (Accessed April 2, 2020). Malabou, Catherine. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012. Mazumdar, Ranjani. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ———. ‘Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema.’ In Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, edited by Gyan Prakash, 150–86. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Nasta, Dominique. Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press, 2013. Neale, Steve. Genre. London: BFI Publishing, 1980. ———. ‘Art Cinema as Institution.’ Screen 22.1 (1981): 11–39. Pethö, Ágnes. ‘The Tableau Vivant as a ‘Figure of Return’ in Contemporary East European Cinema.’ Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies 9 (2014): 51–76. https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/ausfm/9/1/art icle-p51.xml. Peucker, Brigitte. The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Prasad, M. Madhava. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. ‘Ghatashraddha.’ In The Cinema of India, edited by Lalitha Gopalan, 170–79. London: Wallflower Press, 2009. Ravetto-Biagioli, Kriss. ‘The Digital Uncanny and Ghost Effects.’ Screen 57.1 (2016): 1–20. Renov, Michael. ‘Toward a Poetics of Documentary.’ In Theorizing Documentary, edited by Michael Renov, 12–36. New York: Routledge, 1993. Ray, Satyajit. Our Films, Their Films. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1976. Rhodes, John. ‘Art Cinema’s Immaterial Labors.’ Diacritics 46.4 (2018): 96– 116. Robinson, Andrew. Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. London: Deutsch, 1989. Romney, Jonathan. ‘The Turin Horse.’ Screen Dail y, February 15, 2011. Ross, Mirian. ‘The Film Festival as Producer: Latin American Films and Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund.’ Screen 52.2 (Summer 2011): 261–67. Satz, Aura. ‘Tableaux Vivants: Inside the Statue.’ In Articulate Objects: Voice, Sculpture, and Performance, edited by Aura Satz and Jon Woods, 157–83. Oxford, NY: Peter Lang, 2009.

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Shigehiko, Hasumi. ‘Sunny Skies.’ In Ozu’s Tokyo Story, edited by David Desser, 118–30. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Singh, Gurvinder. ‘Theatrical Release Is a Waste.’ Hindustan Times, November 11, 2017 (Accessed April 15, 2020). Staiger, Janet. ‘Individualism Versus Collectivism.’ Screen xxiv. 4–5 (1983): 69– 79. Tiwari, Sudha. ‘From New Cinema to New Indie Cinema: The Story of NFDC and Film Bazaar.’ In Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution, edited by Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram, 25–45. London: Routledge, 2019. Trott, Florence. ‘The Cult of Stanley Kubrick: Subversion, Sci-Fi, and Control.’ The Face, June 25, 2019. https://theface.com/culture/the-cult-of-stanleykubrick-subversion-sci-fi-and-control. Ungar, Steven. Cléo de 5 à 7 . London: BFI Publishing, 2008. V¯ajapey¯ı, Udayana, and Gurvinder Singh. Uncloven Space: Mani Kaul in Conversation with Udayan Vajpeyi. Translated by Gurvinder Singh. Hyderabad: Quiver, 2013. Walker, Michelle Boulous. Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Yengde, Suraj. ‘Dalit Cinema.’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41.3 (2018): 503–18.

Filmography Aidondla Aidu. Directed by V. Prakuna Prakash et al (2011). Alms for a Blind Horse. Director by Gurvinder Singh (2011). The Assassin. Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien (2015). Bitter Chestnut. Directed by Gurvinder Singh (2019). Caché. Directed by Michael Haneke (2005). Chauthi Koot. Directed by Gurvinder Singh (2015). City of God. Directed by Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles (2002). Court. Directed by Chaitanya Tamhane (2014). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Directed by Ang Lee (2000). Ek Musafir Ek Hasina. Directed by Raj Khosla (1962). Fandry. Nagraj Manjule (2013). Jai Bhim Comrade. Directed by Anand Patwardhan (2011). Janmadinam. Directed by Suma Josson (2008). Jaoon Kahan Bata Ae Dil . Directed by Aadish Keluskar (2018). Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles . Directed by Chantal Akerman (1975). Jonaki. Directed by Aditya Vikram Sengupta (2018). Kanchenjungha. Directed by Satyajit Ray (1962).

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Kaul: A Calling (2016) Directed by Aadish Keluskar (2016). Labour of Love. Directed by Aditya Vikram Sengupta (2014). La Muerte de un Burócrata. Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1966). Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Directed by Bi Gan (2018). No Smoking . Directed by Anurag Kashyap (2007). Paanch. Directed by Anurag Kashyap (2003). Piravi. Directed by Shaji N Karun (1989). Pratikriya. Directed by Rahat Yusufi (1990). Roma. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron (2018). Sometimes. Directed by Priyadarshan (2018). Tabarana Kathe. Directed by Girish Kasaravalli (1986). Thondi Muthalum Driksakshiyum. Directed by Dilesh Pothan (2017). The Turin Horse. Directed by Ágnes Hranitzky and Béla Tarr (2011). Umberto D. Directed by Vittorio De Sica (1952). Uski Roti. Directed by Mani Kaul (1970). A Zed and Two Noughts. Directed by Peter Greenaway (1985).

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Part II

CHAPTER 4

Bombay Noir

Looking for film noir in India, apparently, is to miss the point of Indian cinema altogether. For on the one hand, debate on the form of Indian popular cinema is alive and well, as evidenced in the recognizable scholarship on the specific form and structuring of various genres. Regardless, noir receives passing mention. By contrast, stateside, the growing number of compendia on film noir, the lists of films added, subtracted, and discovered, defy any settled definition of a canon rather, revisionism plagues film noir more than any other genre, most prominently gestured through

Thanks to Andrew Spicer for a careful reading of an earlier version of this chapter and to Anuj Vaidya for promising a partnership in crime. The first version of this chapter was a presentation at SCMS in the wonderful company of David Desser and Corey Creekmur. I have benefitted from questions raised in subsequent presentations at Westminster University, University of Stonybrook, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Industrial Design Center, Indian Institute of Technology, Powai, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and The South Asia Institute, The University of Texas at Austin. Previous versions of this chapter have appeared in the following publications: ‘Bombay Noir.’ In A Companion to Film Noir. Eds. Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson. (London: Wiley Blackwell Publishers, 2013). ‘Bombay Noir.’ Journal of the Moving Image 15, December 2015. I thank Andrew Spicer, Helen Hanson, and Moinak Biswas for these invitations. © The Author(s) 2020 L. Gopalan, Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54096-8_4

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nomenclature: historical noir, neo-noir, tech-noir, French noir, Nikkatsu Noir, Hong Kong Neo-Noir, Kowloon Noir, East Asian Noir, to name a few.1 Between James Naremore’s magisterial book More than Night: Film Noir and Its Contexts and David Desser’s provocative offering in his essay ‘Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism,’ I must confess, to being gripped by ‘Noir envy.’2 Given the depth of historical research and global reach of the genre proposed in these studies, a calculated hunch and deep envy suggests that at one point or another Indian cinema too must have been seduced by noir’s allure. However, as the unfolding chapter reveals detecting noir accents in Indian cinema is less than straightforward, rather a circuitous route yielding unexpected rewards in the form of lost films—both long and short—, marginal styles, low-budget productions, obsolete technologies, as well as conceptual brilliance. To look for noir is to remap genealogies of Indian cinema. It is as well to undergo cognitive relocations when confronting the distinctiveness of Indian cinema. In the spirit of the original cinephiles, let us begin this chapter with a familiar directive found in a policier, slightly altered: hunt down the films! Long absent in Indian cinema studies, film noir is finally sighted in 2000 by Corey Creekmur in his reading of Raj Khosla’s Hindi film C.I.D (1956): ‘If C.I.D.’s story incorporates some of the differences between traditional detective stories and the hard-boiled variations that inspired film noir, in its visual style the film’s affiliation with Hollywood noir is even more evident.’3 Eschewing the presumption of direct influence or homage Creekmur suggests a wider net of influences and affiliations with the visual style of film noir than has hitherto been explored in writing on this period, particularly discovering a consonance between the opening segments of Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) and C.I.D. It appears for reasons that will continue to unravel as scholarship expands, historical noir styles subside completely in popular Indian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, resurfacing again as cycles of neo-noir films emerge from America, Japan, and Hong Kong right up to the late 1980s.4 Taking a cue from Creekmur’s armature of hindsight, in retrospect, the year 1989 seems over-determined: two films reshaped the codes and conventions of Indian popular cinema and provided intimations of a concept that was yet to arrive in the scholarship, film noir.5 The first, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989), is a film that has by now been canonized by scholars in two different accounts.6 My reading in Cinema of Interruptions (2002) classifies it as a gangster film drawing on its visual

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and narrative virtuosity, most evident in extensive explorations of time and point of view in the film. A complementary reading of Chopra’s film is forwarded in Ranjani Mazumdar’s Bombay Cinema (2007) when her attention turns to narratives of the decline besetting the city of Bombay: ‘the city of ruin emerges to express catastrophe, despair, and permanent crisis’ and later ‘the spatial topography of dread, decay, and death. One of the principle features of noir is its ability to destroy urban spectacle.’7 What Mazumdar ushers into focus is the idea of noir, a genre that since 1980s clings to the gangster films, as is the case with other national cinemas in earlier decades. While crime films abound in other regional cinemas, Tamil films for instance, gangster films rely on the topos of a modern city and the repeated return to Bombay in such films seals its fate as the iconic city in this genre. In a series of overlaps and steady distillation, ‘Bombay Noir’ is the term I want to recognize as the concept that emerges from the shadows of Mazumdar’s ‘Bombay Cinema’ and ‘noir,’ rife with anachronism.8 In the archives of cinephilia, however, the primacy of the term, Bombay Noir, belongs to the long-lost, now cult classic Raakh/Ashes to Ashes directed by Aditya Bhattacharya and also released in 1989. A desultory, hot-headed lad turns into a killer after his girlfriend is raped is Raakh’s flimsy plot line that slips behind the spectacular visual compositions that prevail in our memory of the film. Without an afterlife on DVD, Raakh disappeared from circulation but its influence is visible in the night-for-night compositions seen in Sudhir Mishra’s Is Raat Ke Subhah Nahin/The Long Night (1996), Ramgopal Varma’s Satya (1998), and several others (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). As if to remind us that the title pledges a rise from ashes, Bhattacharya released a slightly edited version for the film festival circuit in 2011, Raakh Redux (2011). The title reverberates through the film at the register of the mise en scène; the opening sequence is a night scene at a tea stall on the edge of a road with no particular landmark in sight. As the film unravels around the existential plight of the reluctant protagonist, Aamir, who hits the road and strikes up a friendship with a kid who happens to be living in the rubble of a razed building, the Bata Shoe Factory on Reay Road, Mumbai, whose ruined splendour has not been seen onscreen again. These are the ruins of a factory system put to waste that Mazumdar imagines in Parinda, but realized in Raakh in a monumental fashion.9 In a breathtaking moment in the film, a day of hanging out is recorded by the camera as it cranes over the façade and after a cut slowly

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Fig. 4.1 Still from Raakh (Courtesy Aditya Bhattacharya)

glides low across a courtyard bordered by stately lamps looming over the factory floor; on the soundtrack is Aamir’s voice-over recounting events that are dissociated from the camera’s movements. How can one not read the leftover scaffolding as a mausoleum for factory work after an era of strikes and lockouts, after arson and extortion gained purchase, and after ordered hits and accidental murders plagued factory life in Bombay?10 In its reincarnation, Raakh Redux cannot arouse the factory system in Bombay, which has witnessed its own moratorium. In its restored state as the primogenitor of Bombay Noir, the film offers us a conceptual model to imagine the archive by summoning lost and marginal films or perhaps even commandeer films from other generic locations. In its second act, the film reminds us of a certain audacity in the visual register, an audacity to play with darkness in colour and shun the flat lighting that is the hallmark of mainstream Indian cinema, Bollywood. In its mannered study of the gangster genre, Raakh Redux recalls for

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Fig. 4.2 Aditya Bhattacharya and actor Pankaj Kapur on the set of Raakh (Courtesy Aditya Bhattacharya)

the cinephile Seijun Suzuki’s gangster films—Branded to Kill (1967) and Tokyo Drifter (1966)—and anticipates Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999). As urban legend goes, a film distributor in Hyderabad advised a novice filmmaker that he should try to emulate the darkness of Raakh in his forthcoming projects; Ramgopal Varma, whose first film Shiva (1989) was released the same year.11 Noir lighting also known as Expressionist lighting, which reduces the blinding effect of the fill light so as to produce shadows and enhance the range of black to white, is by all measures largely a style that is the provenance of cinematographers and to glimpse noir in Bombay cinema is to glean for this style.12 The legendary cinematographer V. K. Murthy was responsible for the house style of Guru Dutt Productions, which, according to Creekmur, showed a deep familiarity with American cinema and noir style as is evident in assorted genres: in comedies such as Mr. & Mrs. ’55 (1955) as well as melodramas, Kaagaz ke Phool/ Paper Boats (1959). An ambience of intrigue and gloominess produced by chiaroscuro silhouettes in black and white films, however, is barely sustained in the

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long first wave of colour films in India.13 Colour processing laboratories were not standardized, often holding unintended images awash in red and blue tints. While cinematographers were still figuring out how to work colour, chance experiments conjured a practice whereupon it was devised that colours in a frame would be sufficient to provide tonal depth. In low-budget films for instance, it was standard practice to use two lights on either side of the camera to provide luminosity in colour and minimize mishaps in the handling of stock at processing laboratories. In higher budgeted films, sets are evenly illuminated, a flat lighting mode that produces few shadows, flattens depths, and softens star faces into a glamorous haze, the characteristics of what became the ‘Bollywood’ style. But one suspects that those cinematographers with a proclivity for using shadows would practice their craft in subterranean genres or we have to await the arrival of cinematographers with a penchant for ‘crepuscular aesthetic.’14 Both possibilities unfolded in Indian cinema. Raakh and Parinda, for instance, display a play of light and shade that noir crime deserves, a far cry from the brightly lit crime films made by N. Chandra, Tezaab (1988), and Manmohan Desai, Naseeb (1981) and Coolie (1983). Binod Pradhan deploys a spectrum of light and shadow, his signature most legible in the slicing planes of actions through cranes and tilts in Parinda. Santosh Sivan’s handiwork in Raakh, by contrast, suffuses the film in blacks and blues and combined with his handheld camera movement, an oblique film style comes into being, an existential noir.15 It appears that shadows define crime films: Hemant Chaturvedi enhances contrast by increasing the ratio between key light and fill light in Vishal Bharadwaj’s gangster film, Maqbool (2003); key light is at least five times as strong as fill light or alternatively, the intensity of fill light is a fifth of highlight. Similarly, Ranjan Palit plays with handheld camera and almost dispenses with the fill light in Bharadwaj’s serial killer film, Saat Khoon Maaf/Seven Sins Forgiven (2010), a style that recalls the lighting arrangements mastered in black and white films. Although a tract on colour processing is long overdue, for our purposes here, I want to restrict the discussion to how features of noir can be indeed discerned in cinemas of India, major and minor, and to insist that reading strategies have to be adjusted accordingly. In the case of Bombay Noir that I will explore further, neo-noir features have a furtive presence in gangster films, serial killers, and capers, a disagreeable bunch of films that offers none of the glamour of Bollywood.16

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Bombay Noir and Gangsters In the annals of Hindi cinema of the late 1980s and 1990s, there is a time before and a time after the lad from Hyderabad made his incursions into filmmaking in Bombay. With a cinephiliac attachment to genre cinema— Sholay (1975), Jaws (1975), and Mackenna’s Gold (1969) figure as his favourite films—Ramgopal Varma’s early experiments were in Telugu horror and crime films, genres that he would elevate from disrepute and neglect as in the case of the former, or revise the latter as heists and capers. In his transition to Bombay cinema, Varma undertook a circuitous route to his favourite genre, initially recapitulating to the dominance of the love story genre in Hindi cinema by offering his version of the genre, a cinephile’s love in Rangeela (1995). His biting criticism of the noveau riche in his Telugu horror films is transformed onto a grander canvas, the Bombay gangster film in which the rackets of the underworld are rendered gruesome on-screen.17 With Satya (1998) Varma inaugurated a gangster film cycle that employed every ambitious filmmaker who wanted to break into Hindi cinema, which till then had the fossilized structure of an oligopoly without the material conditions undergirding it.18 Satya’s success helped formalize his own production outfit, defiantly named Factory. As a producer he was responsible for a cycle of films in which protagonists are crime bosses, gangsters, kidnappers, and femme fatales; the cityscape a playground for land speculations and the sea front open for smuggling. In their verve, productions from Factory radiated a distinctive style and narrative mode whose imprint is still evident long after Varma folded his operations. It is in the refurbishing of horror films that Varma’s signature is most legible; the shape of duration is loosened from its customary place and continues to echo in contemporary small budget ‘multiplex’ films: shorter films, songs and dance sequences excised, interval erased, and so on. The name of the production company was Varma’s response to the old guard that dismissed his ability to churn out films and rebound after every crash. His financial calculations for film productions spawned a series of mergers and collaborations so as to stave off the losses of one through the winnings of another, a hustle that cannot escape the impression of being seen as front companies in their changing titles: Ke Sera Sera, RGV, Sahar, XYZ, and so on. His response to the heady period of globalization and liberalization of the 1990s was to depict intrigue and betrayal among Bombay gangs whose structures of operations on a global stage were no

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different from the legitimate corporations who were exploiting the loopholes of changing tax codes; white collar crime was not that different from the organized structure of the underworld as is revealed in his film Company (2002). Let us begin after the interval in Company. Unfolding on the screen is a montage of cityscapes: high angle shots of skyscrapers on the sea front that seem recognizable as snapshots of Mumbai; a couple of foggy images of high-rises; and still more random shots of high-rise buildings in tropical settings—the proverbial tile roofs and palm trees in the mise en scène. On the soundtrack, we hear the shrill ringing of a string of cell phones, one by one they ring and, on each instance, release a different tune. As the ringing becomes louder and more insistent, the editing accelerates and produces a shuffling of images whose speed throws the quietly composed images of the high-rises askew. We do not eavesdrop on conversations conducted on these cell phones but are directed to understand how the topography of the city or cities has been remapped by the satellite reach of the cell phone that the film suggests echoes the preeminent sound of contemporary global urban-landscape. In this regard, this moment in the film recalls the early genre of city films whose fascination with the frenetic pace of urban life was conveyed to us through vehicular sounds and whistles of the factory—the symphony of the city. Yet in Company, sounds of the modern city are either suppressed or subsumed to the highpitched sounds of the cell phones, producing with considerable acoustic flourish a hybrid between an earlier cinematic city of panoramic shots and newer ones that are fragmentary snapshots.19 Company prepares us for this series of post-interval images in several ways. Early in the film, immediately following the first song and dance number, the film cuts to a series of extreme long shots of a city that we assume is Mumbai. The camera follows the flight pattern of a hawk and the voice-over on the soundtrack—actor Makrand Deshpande’s—narrates the characteristics of the predator bird in a tone that one could easily associate with television commentaries on wildlife. The abrupt cut from the hawk’s hunting instincts to Malik’s biography—one of the two gangster protagonists in the film—encourages the viewer to form a metaphorical association between Malik and hawk. But what is more interesting for my purposes here is the series of the images of high-rises and the flying hawk, a set of optical and acoustic registers that will be worked over in the portions after the interval; the cityscapes in the later instance are

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matched with more agitated and jangling sounds of several cell phones, which replace the gravitas of the initial voice-over. The ubiquity of the telephone, both mobile and wall-units, characterizes the movement and transactions across different spaces in Company. Malik, the minor don whose fortunes are on the rise, and Chandu, a hot-headed small time thug who climbs quickly to the top of Malik’s organization, reach out to the cell phones to collapse spatial differences within Mumbai and in their relocation to Hong Kong, the spatial distance between the two cities. When Chandu seeks refuge in Kenya, cell phone calls triangulate between the three locations.20 Even the wall unit, a less glamorous version of cellular technologies, plays a substantial part in the film: Crime Branch officer Srineevasan locates a mole in this office by obtaining telephone records that reveal an exchange of calls between Malik and his subordinate; Malik’s girlfriend, Saroja, forewarns Chandu’s wife, Kannu, of an impending assault on Chandu’s life by using a telephone in her bedroom in Hong Kong.21 As phone calls accelerate the movement of information between spaces—hits are arranged and called off with substantial ease because of cell phones—they also accentuate an older rhythm of simultaneity and causality that characterize action genres: the visual rhythm of intercutting. Company is rife with various degrees of intercutting starting from shot reverse shots in one room to a three-way phone conversation between Chandu in his non-descript Hong Kong office to Kekre in a jeep on a highway out of Bombay, a style that fortifies the film’s thematic concerns of rapid movement across national boundaries. This resort to cellular phones does not acknowledge the range of possibilities that are currently available to signal temporal simultaneity that include split frames onscreen or a more radical disregard for flight from one spatial location to another in favour of virtual travel accomplished by cruising the web. Apparently, Company prefers to restage styles of movement and blockage that surface in earlier cycles of the global crime thriller while simultaneously intensifying the audio and optical effects ensuing from a chase sequence by borrowing from contemporary cellular technologies. In lieu of high-speed chase sequences through roads, urban and exurban, Company turns to roadways as the staging ground for a hit. The contract, or ‘supari,’ begins in Zurich, Switzerland, where Raote, a minister in the state government, commissions a hit; the target is none other than Home Minister Patil, a member of his own party. We cut from a lakeside view in Zurich, where the contract is issued to a balcony on the

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seafront in Hong Kong. The camera glides between Malik, Vilas, Pandit, Saroja, Kannu, and other hangers-on as they draft a plan to kill Patil but according to Raot’s dictates that the hit should be perceived as an accident lest it draws too much attention from the media. The music is upbeat with throwaway lines indicating the similarities between scripting a hit and film. Malik conjures an ingenious solution, a road accident, carefully calibrated but which will appear to be nothing more than a routine accident. In a close-up, he storyboards the crash: on a two-lane highway, a cargocarrying lorry will swing into the opposite lane, toppling the minister’s car. With little lapse between conception and execution, the film cuts to Mumbai where Kekre is lurking outside the minister’s residence waiting to tail him. Sighting the unexpected addition of two young children in the minister’s car, Kekre panics and reaches Chandu in Hong Kong, who in turn, calls Malik who is transacting business on a motorboat. Chandu’s sentimental attachment to children momentarily ruins the smooth operation of the assassination and on-screen we witness the renegotiations as telephone calls fly back and forth between Kekre and Chandu, and then between Chandu and Malik. The film intersperses these exchanges with high angle, long shots of a highway where we see an even movement of cargo traffic in one direction and the minister’s two-car convoy tracked at some distance by Kekre’s jeep. Malik grows increasingly impatient with Chandu and has no intention of calling off the hit. Piqued, he short circuits the three-way telephone exchange by directly ordering Kekre to carry out the assassination. What yields on-screen is a shot of a major crossing on a highway. A fully loaded lorry veers into the minster’s car precisely at the moment when his security team has inched a few meters ahead. The impact of the collision spins the vehicle off the road and in seconds it goes up in flames. As the film cuts, we move into a heated exchange between Chandu and Malik on the virtues of killing children, which also bears on the discipline of the pecking order in the gang, all of which will precipitate in the splintering of the gang after Chandu kills Vilas Pandit and flees to Nairobi. But what is of interest to me is the orchestration of the assassination as accident. The cellular economy quickens the flow of information and it matters very little to us or to Kekre that Malik and Chandu are located in Hong Kong while Kekre tails the minister on a highway out of Mumbai; distances are of little consequence as long as the cartography of the accident is transparent to all the killing parties. What the assassination is predicated on is an even flow of traffic on the two-lane highway that we

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also witness from a high angle shot but even the most regulated traffic has to acknowledge the possibility of the rogue driver who can swerve across a moving lane of traffic. It is precisely the possibility of such human error that Malik and gang bank on, a calculated risk that is fairly successful when older and newer technologies coexist, highways and cell phones. It is worth noting that there is nothing exceptional about the trope of the motor accident in the action genres; often speed results in crashes in crime thrillers.22 A state-of-the-art version is found in Syriana (2005) where the film marshals technologies available to the military-industrial complex to assassinate a crown prince towards the end of the film. In a stunning replay of precision-guided bombing, U.S. fighter planes take instructions from a remote location in Washington, D.C., as they swoop down to focus on one car in the prince’s convoy. Despite Syriana’s exposé of the interdependency between oil interests and the war economy, the special effects in the film emerge from the very military-industrial complex that the film levels its critique. Company, in contrast, is produced by a film industry that functions at the margins of such heavy weaponry and it follows that the special effects would be less militaristic and by extension, less spectacular. Hence what unfolds on-screen is an old-fashioned accident regulated by cellular technologies. Yet, the film does not view cellular technology as a neutral conduit between spaces, an instrument that can aid the business of the underworld, but as a device that can be subjected to eavesdropping and surveillance. In a showdown at Aslam Ali’s place, Malik ticks off his rival Saeed for conducting business over the phone. Krishnan, Chandu’s foot soldier who inherits a substantial portion of the business in Mumbai, is seen talking on a rotary phone but he too will resort to the anonymity of the call booth to advise Chandu against arriving in Mumbai as he flees from Hong Kong after having gunned down Malik’s manager, Vilas Pandit. What is already being intimated in these random gestures of cautiousness is the double-edged sword of cellular technology: its expansiveness maps a territory for the underworld that is no longer beholden to conducting its activities in the dark alleyways of the modern city, but one that spills into the suburban spread of the city and beyond national borders. At the same time, cellular technologies are available to a wide range of surveillance techniques that often exceed its own imaginings of itsself as a breakthrough technology. Despite these fleeting moments of paranoia, Company remains somewhat sanguine about cellular technology, resorting instead to an older form of crime thriller that has

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the police hunting down criminals across national boundaries: Srinivasan locates Chandu in Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong police seem to be in constant touch with the Mumbai crime branch with updates on the most recent shoot-outs and underworld activities. However, it would be premature to suggest that Company harbors an exhilarating relationship to the contemporary mediascape, where the casual deployment of cellular technologies widens the activities of the gangsters as they move effortlessly between Mumbai, Hong Kong, Nairobi, Zurich, South Africa, and Bangkok on the one hand, and on the other hand, narrows the distances while simultaneously decentering the structure of the organization. A closer look suggests the film is equally invested in conveying a deep familiarity with contemporary mediascape that includes a wide range of visual technologies that are on the continuum from entertainment to surveillance. Not unlike the cell phone, television monitors are omnipresent in the film often broadcasting on-the-ground news of gangster killings and police encounters. Chandu’s mother, Rani, discovers from a television news programme that her son has been gunned down in Kenya; Sreenivasan cruises television channels to keep abreast of news media’s reportage of gangster activities and so on. There is even a sinister moment when a Steadicam glides up close to Minister Raot and his family glued to the television news programme detailing Chandu’s arrest by the Crime branch, a proximity that produces the startling effect of us watching Raot watching television. A more vivid interplay between film and other visual technologies is available in the credit sequence that offers us a montage of images that includes extractions from surveillance cameras and recordings obtained directly from a television monitor, a mode of presentation that locates us in a similar position as television viewers and not as film goers. Here, the film relies on our familiarity with television modes of investigative reporting, especially exposés conducted by using hidden cameras. Perhaps the most sensationalist example of this mode of investigation in recent history is best illustrated in the news magazine Tehelka’s sting operations that recorded officials from the Department of Defense accepting bribes. We can also include in this category the banal circulation of cellular phone-images of film star Kareena kissing her boyfriend in a café in Bombay. Early in the film, Chandu and his buddies state that nobody goes to the film anymore ever since VCDs and DVDs hit the market. A hidden recording device also frames criminals in the film: Warsi’s bragging that he is the don of Mumbai and not Malik,

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is conveyed in no time to Hong Kong—we are unaware of the primary recording device—and the telephone offers us access to the off-screen space of Warsi’s killing. Similarly, the voice-overs evoke the gravitas of classical Hollywood’s crime films, but here in keeping with the narrative’s movement through multiple spaces we hear several: the omniscient narrator’s voice is credited to Makrand Deshpande, but Malik, Sreenivasan, and a newscaster from Aaj Tak/Till Today amplify the multiple layering of the contemporary mediascape. The prolific references to current technologies of recording and watching are not relegated to discrete moments of sequencing, random props in the mise-en-scène or calibrations on soundtrack but bleed into the composition of filmic images, especially the ones that have long worked as stock footage in action genres—the panoramic shots of cities and other kinds of establishing shots. In effect, it encourages me not to overlook these customary images. Subtly and surreptitiously, the film recasts the common objective point of view in the film so as to implicate us in a relay of surveillance. Panoramic shots of Bombay, Hong Kong, or Nairobi are routinely distorted through the use of fisheye lens. While the lens captures a wider picture on-screen, we cannot escape the association of its widespread deployment in surveillance cameras, a deployment that the film seems not only cognizant of, but also wants to impress us with its suggestion. Here, the wide-angle panoramic shots offer pause, if it is possible in this narrative that unfolds in a breakneck speed, and allow us to question the contours of the filmic images that it serves up for our entertainment. One of the more unsettling effects occurs when the film captures Sreenivasan drive to Chandu’s hospital in a pan from left to right using a fisheye lens; there is somebody watching the Crime Branch officer. We also see an extensive use of this lens in establishing shots shot indoors. For instance, a routine shot-reverse-shot sequence marks the exchange between Chandu and Malik with reaction shots of other gang members before the segment closes with an establishing shot that distorts the space while mapping the entire room. Even in Sreenivasan’s office, the camera is located somewhere below his desktop and will scope out the entire room at the end of an interrogation; he too is subjected to a regime of surveillance. At times, it is a low angle shot that awaits a character’s movement through a wide space, producing the effect of a stalking camera that we see in horror films, even in Ram Gopal Varma’s Bhoot/ Ghost (2003). A close analysis of the location of this camera has failed to uncover any

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systematic placement; rather the camera is everywhere, and we are the ideal viewers of various scenes of action. It is worth remembering Paul Virilio’s theorization of the longstanding relationship between the cinematic apparatus and the war machine: military reconnaissance missions inspired high angle shots from helicopters.23 Despite this revelation, as viewers we have become accustomed to these images and do not regularly endow them with sinister meaning.24 The film’s experiments with the distortions made possible by using anamorphic lenses bear the signature of the cinematographer Hemant Chaturvedi, who had been deploying this effect as a cameraman for the wildly popular Hindi television quiz show, Kaun Banega Crorepati in which he would amplify the size of the small studio audience through such optical effects. For Company he outfitted a 435 Arriflex with a 24mm anamorphic lens procured from a camera supplies store that had long been in disuse since the 1970s. The squeezed image produced during the shoot was stretched during projection to achieve the intended distortion; ‘wrong lens on the right camera’ is how Chaturvedi describes his shooting style for Varma’s film.25 The anamorphic images cast a dystopian pall over the narrative not through spectacular digital effects that stage a paranoia associated with state-ordered technologies of surveillance but by fundamentally reorienting our relationship to the perceptual regime: the establishing shot that always gives us an overview of the space of action is substantially revised so that a wider and distorted space of action is carved out. By providing a curvature to the ordinary gangster film, the ubiquitous use of fisheye lens infuses the narrative with an unprecedented level of paranoia that richly deserves our consideration of the film as a central text in Bombay Noir. A cinephile, alert to the absence as well as the presence, may have noticed the unhurried yet decided departure from crime narrative Bombay’s skyline and monuments since Company; the city’s gothic grandeur appears as a remainder of an earlier era of colonial and postcolonial spectacle that has now been swapped for malls, suburbs, slums, and back alleys recorded under a new appellation, Mumbai. The irony should not be lost on us that a city notorious for its highly speculative real estate market has long been beholden to memorializing its skyline in crime films.26 With the slow disappearance of the panoramic night shots of Marine Drive and the back lit monuments of gothic Bombay, a new kind of crime cycle commences with gangs decamping to overseas locations such as Dubai as in Ab Tak Chappan (2004) and Dil Par Mat Le Yaar (2000).

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More pointedly in Vishal Bharadwaj’s Maqbool (2003), the movement is towards the interiors of the country where crime plots are hatched to be executed in Bombay. This breathtaking adaptation of Macbeth, according to Bharadwaj, was inspired by Parinda, Varma’s films, and Mahesh Manjrekar’s Vaastav (1999), and is allegedly a gangster film. Yet the grandeur of narrative matched by Chaturvedi’s cinematography produces a surreal effect at times and at other moments, the play of light and shade in the badlands of a feudal outpost provokes one to think of the possibility of this film as a thinly disguised noir wandering into sunlight, a paradoxical effect that prompts one to utter, ‘sunny noir.’27 Bombay has a spectral presence in Maqbool . By setting the drama in the hinterlands it revises and darkens the gangster genre.

Serial Killers and Media Classic Although the disappearing skyline is not the purview of Mazumdar’s analysis of a crop of recent films—spatial metaphors dictate her nomenclature—she detects a ‘landscape of dystopia’ in ‘Urban Fringe’ films that rehearse ‘a crisis of representation particular in its cinematic form.’28 Mazumdar’s ‘Urban Fringe’ clings to the shadows of noir, close enough that we can see it as a junior branch of the genre, neo-noir in Bombay cinema, producing films that critique the dominant image of Indian cinema, ‘Bollywood.’ Noir percolates a low-budget production at a different register, thus summoning our attention to another set of conditions. In the early 1990s a group of five aspiring filmmakers huddled in a basement office in the suburb of Andheri watching videos streaming on a television monitor.29 The men with outsized ambitions were Shivam Nair, Sriram Raghavan, Sridhar Raghavan, Shiv Subramaniam, Abbas Tyrewala, and Anurag Kashyap—the ‘gang’ from Media Classic. Sriram Raghavan had graduated from the Film Institute and was a transitional generation addicted to long nights of video watching at film school; Shivam Nair had edited and directed television shows; Shiv Subramaniam and Sridhar Raghavan were toying with scripts and the former had acted in a couple of films, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda and Sriram Raghavan’s student film, Eight Column Affair (1987). Abbas Tyrewala was a kid from Bombay who was vying to cash in on his dreams to break into the mainstream film industry at any cost, but the iconoclastic cinephiliac world of Media Classic was heady. Anurag Kashyap, who has widely narrated on

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various online sites, his film education acquired during this period, recalls a mutilated video of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) streaming on a small monitor; for him this basement was the school laboratory that he did not have to abscond. The fate of Media Classic itself is commonplace in the chronicles of independent productions across the world, giving off a whiff of chance and dashed hopes, and deserves recounting. A roomful of talent is easy prey for a ruthless entrepreneur and one arrived at Media Classic—a real estate developer, Janak Mehta, who had also produced a Marathi serial. His offer was fifty-two films, forty-five minutes in length to be screened on television; the films were their choice. The gang now morphed into a working collective to devise a strategy to link the prospective films together: a series about serial killers. A collaborative machine was put into place and yielded five video films in 1999: Sriram Raghavan’s Ram Raghav; Anurag Kashyap’s Last Train to Mahakali; and Shivam Nair’s three films: Auto Narayan, Billa-Ranga and Firoz Daruwala. Culled from stories published in an in-house cop magazine published in Marathi, Dakshita, and these films mix meticulous details found in police procedurals with the salacious zest of serial killer films. A youthful irreverence towards mainstream cinema was the inspiration for these films but their innocence made them unprepared for Mehta’s machinations: a declaration of bankruptcy after the first five films. It soon became apparent to Media Classic that they were victims of a double crossing: bankruptcy was a substantial tax write-off for the builder who had made a killing as a real estate developer. Bailing out on a commitment of fifty-two films was a blow to the gang, but the bigger letdown was the embargo placed on screening of the films since the twisted logic was that a bankrupted project could not generate revenue. (Allegedly Ramgopal Varma saw the films and hired Anurag Kashyap to script his Satya and his production company, Factory, produced Sriram Raghavan’s Ek Hasina Thi [2004]). Double-crossing court responses and a version of this relay played out on a different screen for Media Classic. While the conditions imposed by bankruptcy included an embargo broadcasting the films on television, there was no clause to stop the screening the films online. Anurag Kashyap’s online cinephile blog Passion for Cinema and YouTube play Last Train to Mahakali on a click of the mouse—the most fitting revenge conjured by cinephiles. (At times, these video films now circulate under other monikers to avoid lawsuits: Billa-Ranga, for instance, has been renamed Kuku to subvert the court ruling embargoing these films.)

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The other video films await adoption by film festivals and retrospectives but currently as contraband DVDs they provide unparalleled glee to a cinephile on whom the irony is not lost that these short works sketch a city that neither resembles the gothic city of Parinda or the centripetal spaces of suburban Mumbai with shiny malls and tall apartment complexes mounted by speculators such as Janak Mehta himself. Rather, these video films are trained on sprawling slums where serial killers prowl at night, their notoriety noted eponymously by Media Classic. In their ability to simulate fear and paranoia in hapless commuters coursing through the arteries of the city, these video films sketch the longevity of such affect since its first sighting in classical noir. In hindsight, these works provide glimpses of a changing mediascape. Both video and television inflected the aesthetics of Media Classic, notwithstanding the contradictions: aspirations of the collective were to work in analog though its members’ cinephile archive was nurtured initially through the portals of video as VCR. To note, this was a period before the construction of multiplexes and a period when the state-run television station Doordarshan had to compete with private satellite television programming, channels on which these serial films would have been exhibited. Although the aspirants preferred the choice of 16mm, Mehta’s budget forced them to shoot on Hi-Band U-matic camera, an obsolete electronic recording technology once used by Doordarshan for making television films. Perceived as an inferior and sub-standard recording technology, Sriram Raghavan admits to feeling less anxious about shooting ratio, a constraint drawn routinely with celluloid stock. While video would be subsequently harnessed by the art world, the view from Media Classic, however, was to consider it as a transitional technology that would fall short of the luminosity available in analog film and be deemed obsolete eventually with the arrival of digital film production. Despite their reservations about video, subsequent works of these filmmakers reveal affection for video monitors and television; incorporated as significant props in their films the scanned images on monitors distinctly recall the collaboration among cinephiles in a basement laboratory. Similarly, the narrative themes of their longer feature films amplify the independent spirits of the 1990s: Anurag Kashyap’s Paanch (2003), Ranjani Mazumdar argues, has the first intimation of a femme fatale; Black Friday (2004) reworks the political drama to convey a closer kinship to noir than expected; Gulaal (2009), loosely recognizable as a political drama, is redolent with intrigue and subterfuge; and No Smoking (2007)

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offers a nihilistic riposte to the State’s cordon sanitaire with excursions to surrealism.30 (With the release of That Girl with Yellow Boots (2010) and the two-part Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), Kashyap has decisively increased the budgets of low-budget indie films.) Sriram Raghavan’s dexterity with action genres harbors a cinephile’s attachment that is evenly matched with film school rigour: avenging women in Ek Hasina Thi (produced at Ramgopal Varma’s Factory) and spy thriller Agent Vinod (2012). Although facsimiles will not suffice, the search for noir in Indian cinema turns out to be an endeavour in disassemblage, strains dispersed across a range of genres and recognizable in lighting, composition, mise en scène, archetypes, and narrative drive. Looking for a prototype is beside the point given the dragnet’s scope to reshape the topography of genre cinema in Bombay, a vindication that squares with Sriram Raghavan’s second long-feature film Johnny Gaddaar/Johnny the Traitor (2007) that was signalled as a caper and thriller on its initial release. Shuffling genre categories barely introduce the film whose conceptual virtuosity, particularly rehearsal of its subject matter outmanoeuvres my own archaeology of Bombay Noir. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to reveal that it lists as one of my top ten films in Sight and Sound’ s Decade Poll, 2012. Acknowledging the film’s seduction summons its operations to be decoded up close, mimicry of its own manoeuvres.

Johnny Gaddaar: Counterfeiting Noir There is a whiff of French in Sriram Raghavan’s Johnny Gaddaar. Kalyan, a corrupt cop from Bangalore who has few compunctions about water boarding his prisoners or cutting off the fingers of those who double cross him, tips off his pal Seshadri, a crime boss, about unloading a consignment of French furniture. The contraband goods are Seshadri’s to have if he fronts 2.5 crore rupees, a proposition that propels him to convene his gang: each of the five members will advance fifty lakhs and the profits on the sale of the contraband goods will be shared equally. Seshadri lays out a meticulous plan of collection and delivery: the strongman in the gang, Shiva, will travel to Bangalore from Bombay by train with the advance and return with the loot. The breezy logic of a caper mobilizes a gripping calculus that we cannot take our minds away from, and which we are doomed to resolve: the secret relationship between numbers and geography that the film insists are linked (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4).

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Fig. 4.3 Night shot in Johnny Gaddaar (Courtesy Sriram Raghavan)

At stake is the hefty figure of 2.5 crores that casts a spell on Minni, Shardul’s wife, who is having an affair with Vikram. The camera lingers on her lipstick marked accounting of the digits on the bathroom mirror, with the number ‘2’ lightly erased as if to alert us to allotments that will be revised. But there are other competing ratios in the division of the heist. At stake are two days: the gang will meet at 7:30 p.m. at Seshadri’s place armed with their share, Shiva will take the money on the 22nd to Bangalore on the 9:30 night train, and return to Bombay on the 25th. Two days is what Seshadri calculates for the exchange of money for goods, and later in the film, it is the same figure that Kalyan will hazard to solve the crime of Shiva and Seshadri’s murders. More numbers run circles around Prakash who exclaims that he has withdrawn thirty-five lakhs from the stock market and needs four days to return it otherwise he will go belly up; earlier he will express frustration at the list of forty-one passengers who were on the train with Shiva, and how it would take ten to fifteen days to track each and every one of them. It is

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Fig. 4.4 Johnny Gaddaar (Title card, courtesy Sriram Raghavan)

again Prakash who, coming up short on the amount secretly corrupts his share with eight lakhs of counterfeiting money.31 In a slow unravelling of the caper, 80,000 of this counterfeit amount is released into the economy by Vikram who has by then amassed the loot: he offers his share to help settle Prakash’s debt of ten lakhs to a player at the club who boasts of having casually piled up twenty-two lakhs at a gambling table the previous year. With these numbers on one side of the equation and the distance travelled to perform the original caper on the other side, the film initiates a counter-geography mapped out by Vikram who subverts the straightforward transaction. He drives out to Goa on the 21st but swerves towards Pune where he parks his car at the train station and orders an autorickshaw to the airport, so as to board a plane to Goa. Securing an alibi by closing a deal with his lawyer Gomez, he surreptitiously slips out of Goa by flying to Bombay on the afternoon of the 22nd; later in the day he sneaks onto the very train that Shiva boarded earlier. Knocking Shiva

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unconscious and dead, Vikram accomplishes his heist by alighting at Pune where his car awaits him at the station. He banks on the fact that his drive from Pune to Bombay will pass off as the return drive from Goa for his accomplices. Phantom geographies abound to confuse us and, by extension, Kalyan the detective. In a fit of dementia, Shiva’s mother insists that her son is off to Calcutta, and not Bangalore. Keeping in pace with the logic of timing in capers, here too we are urged to grasp the significance of punctuality or face the consequences of running against time: the gang convenes at 7:30 p.m. at Seshadri’s; night train to Bangalore at 9:30 p.m.; wedding anniversary party hosted by Varsha and Prakash, 8 p.m.; Vikram sets off to meet his girlfriend at 2 p.m. but does not get home before 2:30 p.m. The dizzying tally of numbers and geography exceeds the diegesis of the film. In the DVD extras we learn from Sriram Raghavan that he was inspired by 240 other Johnnys in world cinema: Johnny Mera Naam (1970), Johnny Guitar (1954), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and so on. More crucially, the short, fleeting quotes from Parwana (1971) cost Raghavan twenty lakhs, a figure that does not tally in any calculation even if you were to skew the figures towards geography or bend them to favour time. There is only one conclusion: ‘Go figure!’ How does one read a film that reads itself at every turn, at every twist pulling in a set of quotations that delights and frustrates a cinephile? Let us begin with the obvious dedications that open the film whose importance is underscored by its appearance before the credit sequence: the film is dedicated to two masters of their domains, Vijay Anand and James Hadley Chase. The latter, an Englishman, is a popular pulp fiction writer in India whose racy narratives and sleazy covers were forbidden pleasures at school as I recall. Raghavan pays homage to him again in the diegesis when the protagonist, Vikram, reads or at least ducks behind Chase’s The Whiff of Money (1969) as the train pulls out of VT Station. A whiff of money chases French furniture (Fig. 4.5).32 The gang is a bunch of bookworms: Minni, Shardul’s wife and Vikram’s girlfriend, reads R.K. Narayan’s Guide, which should be recognized as the source for one of Vijay Anand’s films. Kalyan too is partial to crime fiction: Crime Lives of Charles Sohbraj is slammed on the table when he arrives in Bombay to commandeer the investigation into Seshadri and Shiva’s murders and locate the missing stash of money. Other kinds of readings in the film send us secret signals on decoding the film: from an oblique angle we see Shiva for the first time, watching Kubrick’s Eyes

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Fig. 4.5 Still from Johnny Gaddaar (Courtesy Sriram Raghavan)

Wide Shut (1999) on television. Are we supposed to correct the idiom to ‘eyes wide open’ as our directive or submit to the logic of misapprehensions and misrecognitions? Shardul is the one rewarded with a close-up of his object of scrutiny: an auto shop’s repair label pasted on Vikram’s car engine puts some of the pieces together. His wife Minni, we learn, whiles away her evenings putting together a jigsaw puzzle of The Titanic, as if that would relieve her from her dead-end marriage to Shardul and straight into Vikram’s arms.33 Prakash is no reader of books but of cards and chance, and at times, signage: writing on a t-shirt invites a diminutive for the wearer—Diesel. He reads his streak of coincidence as luck and rises to the bait of a canny player in his club and promptly loses ten lakhs. Seshadri, who dies too early before the interval, is alert to slips of tongue: Vikram implicates himself when he reveals a detail that he was not to know. Reading and decoding by members of the gang points the finger at Vikram but at every turn a smart aleck is killed while cracking the whodunit puzzle. Reeling us into a crime film with details of routine business between corrupt cops and smart thugs, the film changes course by switching codes: the neat caper unravels, undone by double crossings that are rendered in

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a style with semblances to noir lighting. For instance, the dark shadows in Vikram’s room, the menacing shadows of the back staircases, and night shots of tall building and back alleys are visual motifs that Marc Vernet isolates in the American film noir and that recur here. Furthermore, the caper absorbs the nihilism of noir by insisting on our astuteness and vigilance in the face of red herrings, which in this film go by another name. Naidu, a cop who collects the ten lakhs owed by Prakash to a club player, spots a series of watermarks on the 1,000 rupees currency note with Gandhi’s beatific smile: a sure sign of counterfeiting. Shardul overseeing the settlement is told that 80,000 rupees of the collection is counterfeited, a fraud that only Naidu’s keen eyes would spot. Shardul tracks Vikram from whose pile the fakes materialized but we know that the Vikram had picked the money from the original collection of 2.5 crores. News of the forgery reaches Prakash, who misreads the situation and heads off to meet Vikram and enlists his support to confront Shardul, whom he assumes has made off with the original collection because (we find out) it was originally Prakash, who could not come up with the entire fifty lakhs and thus adulterated his contribution with eight lakhs of counterfeit notes, a short-term arrangement that he assures Vikram he would have rectified. In response to Prakash’s confession, Vikram shoots him dead, but soon thereafter is cornered by Shardul in the bar who, in turn, meets his deadly end twice over: Vikram’s gun and Minni’s cuckoldry. The film extends the metaphor of counterfeiting further, propelling it to a deadly end. After Shardul is killed and Minni appeased, Vikram tries to pass himself off as Shardul by wearing the latter’s jacket and driving his car across rain-lashed roads to collect the loot that he assumes Minni and he will now possess. In the meantime, Varsha deduces that Prakash was slain by Shardul and his car toppled off the cliff into the lake. In a punitive ending, yet thrillingly reminiscent of the best of closures, she guns down Vikram mistaking him for Shardul. Counterfeits coupled with misrecognition turn out to be tried and reliable aphorisms plucked from pulp fiction. Tracing the vertiginous logic laid out by the film hardly helps us to run inroads into its hermeneutical system that has arrows pointed in opposite directions, and is constantly outwitting us with confounding logics. Vikram’s decision at the road sign mounted at the entrance to the highway—too easily settled on a string of coin tosses, one out of three and then three out of five, to Pune or to Goa?—is our plight too. A punter’s

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intuition, the film suggests, is equally matched with a detective’s/reader’s insights. However, this spiralling logic of chance and design is blunted by the film’s sentimental attachment to a set of objects that it returns to periodically and nudges us to look at: the topos of cinephilia. The opening credits move from black and white shots of slick streets with vehicles criss-crossing the screen, a sequence that reverts to openings of classical American film noir and the black and white films of Navketan Films such as Kala Bazaar (1960), Kala Paani (1958), and C.I.D. After the opening shooting in black and white, red blood drips over the title—a direct homage to the title sequence of Vijay Anand’s Johnny Mera Naam (1970) in which dripping blood is the chosen font for the title sequence— Johnny Gaddaar turns decisively to colour. This homage to Anand is more overtly intimated in the black and white pre-credit sequence where we see photographs of Chase and Anand, side by side, provoking fits of adolescent bilingual punning arising from a translation of Anand’s last name into English—Chase Happiness—and by extension a deep suspicion that both authors embraced pseudonyms in their devotion to crime. Commanding as much respect as Chase (but among cinephiles), Anand is the cult director whose flair with the thriller finally receives the most intimate recognition in Johnny Gaddaar. Johnny Mera Naam playing on a television at a motel desk (reminiscent of all the films beholden to the psychotic desires of such gatekeepers after Psycho) supplies Vikram with his secret identity, Johnny, to which the initial ‘G’ is added spawning more bilingual puns in the diegesis: ‘G’ (ji) a phatic conveying politeness in Hindi is renamed ‘Gaddaar’ by Prakash; which translates into English as one who betrays. Hence the title of the film: Johnny Gaddaar. Other pseudonyms proliferate in the film: Seshu resorts to the diminutive ‘Vicky’ moments before trapping Vikram; Minni passes for Twinkle on Vikram’s mobile to hide her infidelity. The profusion of names mimics Johnny Mera Naam in which the protagonist plays a spy donning several monikers and infiltrates a crime gang with tentacles into Nepal. In that film’s denouement, the spy’s real identity is revealed in a drawn-out name-calling fist fight between warring antagonists that is conveniently resolved as a union of long-lost siblings. To decode Raghavan’s Johnny Gaddaar one has to enter the logic of Anand’s film that is equally besieged with a different kind of counterfeiting, a shadow play of in cognito. In a lesser film this quotation from Vijay Anand’s film may have served as a reverential homage or a throwaway remark, whereas in this updated

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caper, the arrow points the other way, to the other film that also plays on television: Parwana (1971). This forgotten B-film starring Amitabh Bachchan, is reified for its split narrative, a hallmark of Indian cinema where the interval serves as an organizing principle.34 In the first half of the film, Bachchan plays a shy writer harbouring his secret love for the girl next door; this is the part that Prakash and Varsha watch on television. The second half of this film converts Bachchan into a scheming criminal who covers his tracks by surreptitiously flying from Bombay to Nagpur to board the Calcutta bound train that originated at Dadar. As it turns out, this is the section that grabs Vikram’s attention and gifts him the diagram to outwit his partners in the caper. But there are other characters in the film that cherish a similar attachment to the B-film: Kalyan cracks the crime by evoking Parwana, which is the template from which Vikram conceived his heist in the middle of a caper. So, it follows that Raghavan’s film grafts Parwana with Johnny Mera Naam, that is the puzzle we have to decipher to outflank the red herrings that the film throws our way in its beguiling calculus of figures and geography.35 Counterfeiting logic is not the preserve of the thematic of the film, but permeates its structuring. The secret password is the provenance of cinephiles whose archives stretch hither thither with a promiscuity that outdoes Minni’s infidelity. In a nod to his earlier film, Ek Hasina Thi, Raghavan leaves women and money untouched at the end of the film, their collusion and shenanigans will require another film. What the film invites us to do is to acquiesce to its oneric logic of associations, the much beloved preoccupation of the cinephile, from one film to another with impunity permissible in dream work. In its extravagant homage to Vijay Anand, Johnny Gaddaar rouses a small, yet impressive cycle of capers in Indian cinema that deserve a revival: Ramgopal Varma’s Telugu film Govinda! Govinda! (1993) recounts an elaborate theft of the monetary offerings at the Tirupati Temple and his production outfit’s Money (1995), a caper. Varma’s collaboration with Mani Ratnam on a script, produced the zany Thiruda! Thiruda!/Thief! Thief ! (1993), which gleefully narrates the antics of a couple of small-town thieves who have chanced upon a trainload of money looted by an international gang of criminals. Comedy is again the mode chosen by Srinivas Bhashyam’s Paisa Vasool (2004) in which two women find themselves unwittingly in a caper. Heist, capers, and counterfeiting are rendered as tomfoolery in Indian films, perhaps playing

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with money is not funny business for the Board of Censors: counterfeiting is an act of treason; heists a criminal act in a monetary economy. Counterfeiting is commemorated as a comic motif in the canonical film, Sholay/Flames (1975): tossing a coin is how Jay decides on a plan of action with his partner in crime, Veeru. At the end of the film we realize that Jay always wins the toss because the coin is a counterfeit. Johnny Gaddaar eschews fixing chance in a coin toss by increasing the stakes to 1,000 rupees currency. In this wager, Raghavan’s film trades comedy for noir, the latter’s anti-capitalism identified by French cinephiles unspools Johnny Gaddaar in its second half.

Conclusion Now is the time to revive Gresham’s Law: bad money drives out good money. Repeated here not as a resigned sigh over whims of destiny or as a directive for winnings thwarted, but as a cautionary tale for another market, the marketplace of ideas and names. Nomenclature too has purchase, its circulation interrupted by fixity: Bollywood to describe the films from India. That is a version of bad money. As the discussion above has revealed, Bombay Cinema, Bombay Noir, Urban Fringe, Caper, Serial Killer Films, Cruel Cinema, also circulate in Indian cinema, drawing these films into a promiscuous global cinephilia that has little patience with unitary terms. Perhaps Bollywood cannot be displaced as the image of Indian cinema, but another exchange of ideas is well underway, a gift economy that has long been in place. In the most extravagant gesture French cinephiles conjured ‘film noir’ for those American films that dared to strike in the shadows. Across decades and into the next century, it is time for some belated Indian gifting: retract Bollywood, issue a slew of new genres that dare to buck the trend. By exhuming lost works and marginal production practices, Bombay Noir conjures the possibility of noir in other sites, Tamil and Bengali cinemas for instance. An idea of Indian noir, however, may never emerge fully given the disenchantment with nationalism and global capitalism that this genre harbors.

Notes 1. Nomenclature is crucial for noir, revising categories generated by sharp curatorial programmes and groundbreaking scholarship. I shall assume

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the general familiarity of Hollywood films and wide availability of scholarship in this area, rather this note is for the joy of renaming that revises and revives film: listing references are categories that have long been in use. ‘Nikkatsu Noir’ surely owes its title to Seijun Suzuki’s films and perhaps the classification was promoted by Criterion’s compendium DVD collection issued in 2009: Nikkatsu noir Nikkatsu Corporation, Janus Films (Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection). One of the earliest evocations of ‘Tech noir’ is in Constance Penley. ‘Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia (on The Terminator and La Jetée).’ Originally published in Camera Obscura 5.3 (1986): 66–85. Reprinted in Constance Penley, The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis Vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Kowloon noir appears in Stephen Teo’s evaluation of Johnnie To’s films: Stephen Teo, Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007). For a sample of the burgeoning scholarship on East Asian Noir, see the impressive line-ups of anthologies and many more articles that have put to rest the dominance of American cinema as the center of noir and neo-noir writings: Chi-Yun Shin and Mark Gallagher, eds., East Asian Film Noir: Transnational Encounters and Intercultural Dialogue (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015). Esther C.M. Yau and Tony Williams, eds., Hong Kong Neo-Noir (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2017). Kim-Mui E. Elaine Chan, Hong Kong Dark Cinema: Film Noir, Reconceptions, and Reflexivity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 2. James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir and Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). David Desser, ‘Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism,’ in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 516–36. 3. Corey Creekmur, ‘Notes on C.I.D.,’ University of Iowa Indian Cinema website. Accessed August 5, 2011. https://indiancinema.sites.uiowa. edu/cid. For an expanded version of this essay, see Corey Creekmur, ‘Indian Film Noir,’ in International Noir, eds. H. Pettey and R. Palmer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 182–92. 4. On Madhava Prasad’s concept of the ‘super genre,’ see his The Ideology of Hindi: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). On action genres with a global resonance, see my Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002). 5. Or was it 1988? One can attribute two dates to Indian films: The Board of Censor Certificate that qualifies the film for release and is the date that

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6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

is held on for national awards in India; the other date that we find on online sites such as imdb is the release date of the film. A film passed by the Board of Censors in late December so is eligible for awards that year but can be released in the following year. This shifting timeline also recurs in American films vying for the shortlist drawn up by the Oscars. Here, I am evoking my reading of Parinda: ‘Memory and Gangsters in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda,’ in Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (2002), 141–78. Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); 150, 160. For a reading of cities, see Ravi Vasudevan’s coinage ‘city of dread’ in his reading of Gardish (1993): ‘Selves Made Strange: Violent and Performative Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema, 1974–2003,’ in The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 303–33. Pulp fiction set in Bombay has a long history in Marathi and Hindi. More recently English writing on the seedier aspects of this metropolis is available in Vikram Chandra and Suketu Mehta’s writing. In an uncanny coincidence of nomenclature worthy of note is Pankaj Mishra’s review of Vikram Chandra’s novel Sacred Games in the New Yorker titled ‘Bombay Noir,’ New Yorker, January 8, 2007. Email exchange with Aditya Bhattacharya, May 2011. For a comprehensive understanding of the convergence between the working class and right-wing politics in Bombay, see Thom Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming an Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Shiva is not a study in the play of light and dark but it was a trendsetter in cinematography: the first Indian film to use the Steadicam. Please read my Bombay (London: BFI Publishing, 2005) for a detailed history of the Steadicam in India. See Marc Vernet’s marvellous essay ‘Film Noir on the Edge of Doom,’ in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993), 1–32. Among the many pithy formulations in his essay, Vernet recall’s Paul Schrader’s own contribution to one-liners that states that preceding film noir of the 1950s there was film gris of the 1940s. On matters of the visual in film noir, it is always rewarding to return to Janey Place and Lowell Peterson’s ‘Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir,’ Film Comment 10.2 (1974): 30–35. Thanks to Ranjan Palit for enlightening discussions on lighting and cinematography. An intertextual relay that haunts this essay in the section on serial killer films is Richard Dyer’s evocation of Chris Drake’s evaluation of Darius

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15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

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Khondji’s cinematography in David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Richard Dyer, Seven (London: BFI Publishing, 1999). Shadows can warp narratives too. Madhu Ambat’s cinematography in Mani Ratnam’s Anjali (1990) was prematurely criticized for bathing children in shadows. I am beholden to David Desser’s reading of genealogies of nomenclature besetting film noir and Bollywood: ‘Shree 420,’ in Cinema of India, ed. Lalitha Gopalan (London: Wallflower Press, 2010), 96–105. Interview with Ramgopal Varma. Mumbai, 2003. Varma can recall the opening sequence of all these films shot by shot. See also Ranjani Mazumdar’s reading of Varma’s Satya and Company in Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Here, I am inspired by Edward Dimendberg’s formulation of the centrifugal and centripetal spaces in his reading of the relationship between American urban spaces and Hollywood style film noir. See his Film Noir and Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). For the intricacies of location shooting in Hong Kong and the composition of car chase sequences in Ringo Lam’s Full Alert (1997), see Julian Stringer, ‘Location Filmmaking and the Hong Kong Crime Film: Anatomy of a Scene,’ in Hong Kong Neo-Noir, ed. Esther C.M. Yau and Tony Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 159–77. With little to substantiate by way of interviews, I would like to imagine that the crowded rooms of Chungking Mansion in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994) packed with Indian men recruited as drug mules inspired Varma’s choice of Hong Kong as a location, a hub, in this narrative of a transnational crime syndicate. Here, it is productive to evoke David Desser’s formulation that the car chase is a recurring trope in the recent crop of global noir films. Consider the car chase in Ronin (1998), for instance. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989). It is not uncommon for Indian filmmakers to solicit the services of an air force pilot for an aerial shot that may add a certain flamboyance to a song and dance number. Thanks to Hemant Chaturvedi for sharing theories of his practice with me, July 2008. It is worth noting that housing woes have figured in documentary films. See Anand Patwardhan’s Bombay Our City (1985). David Desser, ‘Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism.’

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28. Ranjani Mazumdar, ‘Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque: The Dystopic,’ in Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 150–86. 29. Details of this period were culled from interviews with Anurag Kashyap, Shivam Nair, and Abbas Tyrewala, August 2007; and interview with Sriram Raghavan, August 2008. 30. Mazumdar, ‘Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque.’ 31. Many thanks to Roberto Tejada who suggested that I would find companionship in Jacques Derrida’s reading of counterfeiting. Only hubris would find this section a copycat crime. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 32. There are more Gallic references supplied extra-diegetically: Sriram Raghavan dedicates his student film 8 Column Affair (1987) to Georges Franju; Vikram is inspired by Alain Delon’s roles in Melville’s French capers. 33. This is an obvious quotation from Citizen Kane: much to Kane’s consternation Susan stretches her days in Xanadu by putting together jigsaw puzzles. 34. See my Cinema of Interruptions for a reading of the interval as a structuring device in popular Indian cinema. 35. There are red herrings here too: Seshadri’s evokes a scene from Brian de Palma’s Scarface (1983) when the gang convenes at his home to tally the collective stash. The songs in the film lead us to other films from the 1960s and 1970s.

Bibliography Chan, Kim-Mui E. Elaine. Hong Kong Dark Cinema: Film Noir, Re-conceptions, and Reflexivity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Creekmur, Corey. ‘Notes on C.I.D.’ University of Iowa ‘Indian Cinema’ website. Accessed August 5, 2011. https://indiancinema.sites.uiowa.edu/cid. ———. ‘Indian Film Noir.’ In International Noir, edited by H. Pettey and R. Palmer, 182–92. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Desser, David. ‘Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism.’ In Film Genre Reader III , edited by Barry Keith Grant, 516–36. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. ———. ‘Shree 420.’ In Cinema of India, edited by Lalitha Gopalan, 96–105, London: Wallflower Press, 2010.

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Dimendberg, Edward. Film Noir and Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Dyer, Richard. Seven. London: BFI Publishing, 1999. Gopalan, Lalitha. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 2002. ———. Bombay. London: BFI Publishing, 2005. Hansen, Thom Blom. Wages of Violence: Naming an Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mazumdar, Ranjani. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ———. ‘Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque: The Dystopic.’ Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, edited by Gyan Prakash, 150–86. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Mishra, Pankaj. ‘Bombay Noir: Vikram Chandra’s Gangster Epic.’ The New Yorker, January 8, 2007. Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir and Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Penley, Constance. ‘Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia (on The Terminator and La Jetée).’ Camera Obscura 5.3 (1986): 66–85. Place, Janey, and Lowell Peterson. ‘Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir.’ Film Comment 10.2 (1974): 30–35. Prasad, M. Madhava. The Ideology of Hindi: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Shin, Chi-Yun, and Mark Gallagher, eds. East Asian Film Noir: Transnational Encounters and Intercultural Dialogue. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. Stringer, Julian. ‘Location Filmmaking and the Hong Kong Crime Film: Anatomy of a Scene.’ In Hong Kong Neo-Noir, edited by Esther C.M. Yau and Tony Williams, 159–77. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2017. Teo, Stephen. Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007. Vasudevan, Ravi. The Melodramatic Public. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Vernet, Marc. ‘Film Noir on the Edge of Doom.’ In Shades of Noir, edited by Joan Copjec, 1–32. London: Verso, 1993. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 1989. Yau, Esther C.M., and Tony Williams, eds. Hong Kong Neo-Noir. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

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Filmography Ab Tak Chhappan. Directed by Shimit Amin (2004). Agent Vinod. Directed by Sriram Raghavan (2012). Anjali. Directed by Mani Ratnam (1990). Auto Narayan. Directed by Shivam Nair (1999). Bhoot. Directed by Ramgopal Varma (2003). The Big Heat . Directed by Fritz Lang (1953). Billa—Ranga. Directed by Shivam Nair (1999). Black Friday. Directed by Anurag Kashyap (2004). Bombay, Our City. Directed by Anand Patwardhan (1985). Branded to Kill . Directed by Seijun Suzuki (1967). Chungking Express. Directed by Wong Kar-Wai (1994). C.I.D. Directed by Raj Khosla (1956). Citizen Kane. Directed by Orson Welles (1941). Company. Directed by Ramgopal Varma (2002). Coolie. Directed by Manmohan Desai (1983). Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar!! Directed by Hansal Mehta (2000). The Eight Column Affair. Directed by Sriram Raghavan (1987). Ek Hasina Thi. Directed by Sriram Raghavan (2004). Eyes Wide Shut . Directed by Stanley Kubrick (1999). Firoz Daruwala. Directed by Shivam Nair (1999). Full Alert. Directed by Ringo Lam (1997). Gangs of Wasseypur. Directed by Anurag Kashyap (2012). Ghost Dog : The Way of the Samurai. Directed by Jim Jarmusch (1999). Govindha Govindha. Directed by Ramgopal Varma (1993). Gulaal . Directed by Anurag Kashyap (2009). Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin. Directed by Sudhir Mishra (1996). Jaws. Directed by Steven Spielberg (1975). Johnny Gaddaar. Directed by Sriram Raghavan (2007). Johnny Guitar. Directed by Nicholas Ray (1954). Johnny Mnemonic. Directed by Robert Longo (1995). Johny Mera Naam. Directed by Vijay Anand (1970). Kaagaz Ke Phool . Directed by Guru Dutt (1959). Kala Bazar. Directed by Vijay Anand (1960). Kala Pani. Directed by Raj Khosla (1958). Last Train to Mahakali. Directed by Anurag Kashyap (1999). Mackenna’s Gold. Directed by J. Lee Thompson (1969). Maqbool . Directed by Vishal Bhardwaj (2003). Money Money. Directed by Siva Nageshwara Rao (1995). Mr & Mrs. ’55. Directed by Guru Dutt (1955). Naseeb. Directed by Manmohan Desai (1981). No Smoking . Directed by Anurag Kashyap (2007).

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Paanch. Directed by Anurag Kashyap (2003). Paisa Vasool . Directed by Srinivas Bhashyam (2004). Parinda. Directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra (1989). Parwana. Directed by Jyoti Swaroop (1971). Raakh. Directed by Aditya Bhattacharya (1989). Raakh Redux. Directed by Aditya Bhattacharya (2011). Ram Raghav. Directed by Sriram Raghavan (1999). Rangeela. Directed by Ramgopal Varma (1995). Ronin. Directed by John Frankenheimer (1998). Satya. Directed by Ramgopal Varma (1998). Scarface. Directed by Brian De Palma (1983). Se7en. Directed by David Fincher (1995). Saat Khoon Maaf /Seven Sins Forgiven. Directed by Vishal Bhardwaj (2011). Shiva. Directed by Ramgopal Varma (1989). Sholay. Directed by Ramesh Sippy (1975). Syriana. Directed by Stephen Gaghan (2005). Taxi Driver. Directed by Martin Scorsese (1976). Tezaab. Directed by N Chandra (1988). That Girl in Yellow Boots. Anurag Kashyap (2010). Thiruda Thiruda. Directed by Mani Ratnam (1993). Tokyo Drifter. Directed by Seijun Suzuki (1966). Vaastav: The Reality. Directed by Mahesh Manjrekar (1999).

CHAPTER 5

Tamil New Wave

To write once again of contemporary Tamil cinema brings back the moment when my latent attachment to this cinema was rekindled: a screening of Subramaniapuram at the Abhirami Theater, Chennai, in the summer of 2008.1 My appreciation of Tamil films took on a further burnish through a special programming venture in collaboration with the 3rd i South Asia Film Festival that was inaugurated at the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) in 2011. The series, which I co-curated with Anuj Vaidya, deployed ‘Cruel Cinema,’ a term that I had coined in a reading of Paruthiveeran (2007).2 Three years later, the concept offered thematic cohesiveness to our chosen range of new films—works that were shifting the style of Tamil feature films.3 Our curatorial programming joined the chorus of encomiums showered on a slew of films whose box office success was matched by confidence associated with auteurs; national and regional awards offered further commendations. In our own slim line-up of four films, whittled down from a lengthier list, including among others Anjathey (2008), Veyyil (2006), and Pasanga (2009), the weekly sequencing began with

Portions of this chapter were presented at the annual Screen Studies Conference, Glasgow, and as a keynote address at the Graduate Student Conference at the University of California, Berkeley. I thank the audience for their questions at both presentations. © The Author(s) 2020 L. Gopalan, Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54096-8_5

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Selvaraghavan’s Pudhupettai (2006), whose box office success mirrored an initial festival recognition at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Unavailable in any other legitimate format to date, the screening at the PFA resulted in the permanent gift of a new 35mm polyester print from Selvaraghavan himself. For the second screening, Paruthiveeran, we borrowed a subtitled festival print from the archives of the Berlinale film festival, where the film had been shown in the Forum section in 2008. Before showing as the third film in our series, Naan Kadavul (2009) had justifiably gained notoriety, following a screening at the Fantastic Film Festival, Austin, in 2010—reflecting that festival’s commitment to the exhibition of unclassifiable films. Our last film, Subramaniapuram, arrived with a gloss: a box office success of over a hundred days in Tamil Nadu, a wide festival circulation, several awards, and critical acclaim including special issues in a Tamil magazine. Placed at the end of our programme, the film, in our reasoning, rounded off the brief of the series as an exploration of the ethics of watching images of violence, which in turn signalled new directions in both the style and content of Tamil cinema. My programme notes on this film recall the curatorial framing; these seem worthy of further consideration in this chapter—their early enthusiasm fired by cinephilia unfaded with the accruement of time (Fig. 5.1).4 There is no mistaking the ambitions of Subramaniapuram, M. Sasikumar’s low-budget first film, which he scripted, directed, and acted in. The film was hailed for its careful mounting of a mise en scène set in the 1980s: long-haired men, wide-legged trousers, and droopy collars. Stripped of the nostalgia associated with costume dramas, the film offers an unvarnished look at the friendship between five men living in the neighbourhood of Subramaniapuram in Madurai. Desultoriness plagues a group of unemployed lads whose long days are squandered on liquor and dodging the law. But youthful indiscretions are not what the film celebrates; rather, it is about how the stagnant misery of wide-open days infects the bonds between men. Political ambitions and romance mobilize a skid into betrayals and shifting alliances, descending yet further into wanton murders and stabbings. With such a searing debut, Sasikumar permanently exited the ranks of Ameer Sultan’s assistants.

Of equal import are the following jointly written programme notes for the series by Anuj Vaidya and myself that pronounced the ‘new directions’ in the subtitle as a ‘Tamil New Wave’:

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Fig. 5.1 Cruel Cinema Poster, 3rd i Film Series

To the seasoned eye, the anointed Friday premieres of the latest blockbusters—with film-star fan clubs trucking in audiences to fill the theaters— are a routine phenomenon hardly worth reporting in Tamil Nadu, where cinema and politics have long been enmeshed in the public sphere. But those are not the films critics are writing about; rather it is the smallbudget film with unknown actors, sizzling with artisanal energy. There are signs aplenty of a Tamil New Wave well underway. As with the new waves before them, here, too, there are new directors on the marquee: Bala, Selvaraghavan, Sultan, Sasikumar and Vasanthabalan. There is a new

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gang in town in Chennai (…) This new wave is infused with cinephilia. Visual quotations from Tamil films punctuate their narratives; protagonists watch films on television and wander into movie theaters, fights break out in movie theaters and projection booths. Yet, these films are at a startling remove from the star antics and high-gloss productions characteristic of both mainstream Tamil cinema and the more pervasive Bombay cinema. Entirely new mises en scènes open up on screen: butchers’ shops, pigsties, teashops, alleyways. Freaks and misfits are the protagonists of these films. The intimate cruelty of family and the tortured narratives of heightened caste and class antagonisms form their narrative backbone. Clearly, this is not fare for a family outing. Cruel Cinema offers an unflinching introduction to these films.5

The directors of this new wave now include Kumararaja Thiagarajan, Nalan Kumarasamy, M. Manikandan, Karthik Subbaraj, Myskkin, and Vetri Maaran—each of whom commandeers distinct dominions of styles. With no sign of abeyance, a steady flow of independent films—that have been embraced by film festivals, cited for awards, and acclaimed by critics—has taken Tamil cinema in new directions since Subramaniapuram, which itself rides the crest of this new wave. As with all new waves—from the very first intimations of conceptual bravado in the French New Wave rolling outwards to Taiwan New Cinema and recalling Kannada New Wave Cinema, to mention a few— here too, the posture against a mainstream feature film industry, with varying degrees of emphasis and self-consciousness, transpires as discussions and proclaimations in the warren of offices in Saligramam and Valsaravakkam, in the airy spaces of new coffee shops, and on television talk shows. In the globalizing media space, wherein one can discover a range of receptions for a given film on blogs and online reviews, the most cherished of all recognitions for my purposes are responses from fellow filmmakers. Time and again, I have noted their recommendations of films I should watch, their enthusiasm for their colleagues’ work and practice, and in turn, finessed an understanding of the different tastes and styles across the terrain of independent filmmaking. This sketching of a scene has me travelling away from the temperamental taste of film festival circuits and towards my own personal discoveries that have come to shape my programming instincts. Being attuned to studied recommendations and casual suggestions from these emerging auteurs speaks of a thick network of connections that bands filmmakers together with collaborations and exchanges at every stage

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of filmmaking. One through line takes the form of apprenticeships that begin with Balu Mahendra, moves to Bala and onwards to Ameer Sultan; Sasikumar assisted both Bala and Sultan. Doubling as actors in their own and their pals’ films distinguishes Sasikumar and Samudhrakani’s careers. Casting actor-director Bhagyaraj, an icon from the mainstream, was Mysskin’s take on the notion of homage in Thupparivaalan (2017), and in turn Mysskin debuted in his brother’s film as well as assuming a substantial role as a messianic figure in Kumararaja’s Super Deluxe (2019). The delight of cameos prevails: Nalan Kumarasamy and Karthik Subbaraj in each other’s films, Samudhrakanni and Vetri Maaran in a few of their friends’ films. The ambitions of the cinematographer realized additionally in directing originate with Balu Mahendra and have their current incarnations legible in M. Manikandan and Vel Raj’s crossover careers. Scriptwriting and production have had a long history of collaboration, and here too the arm is extended towards finishing films: Nalan Kumarasamy wrote one of the storylines for Kumararaja’s Super Deluxe; Bala produced Mysskin’s Pisaasu (2014); and actor Dhanush allegedly ghost-directed Velraj’s Velaiillapattadhari/VIP (2014) and Soundarya Rajinikanth’s VIP 2 (2017) and was the actor credited for all of the songs in VIP and at for least three in VIP 2. To round off, a collective celebration of post-production, such as the public forum on Kaaka Muttai (2014), is one of the pathways of alliances and involvement.6 In the apparent absence of manifestos, such rapport between men reveals a considered enactment of the philosophy of friendship—though not explicitly acknowledged in these terms by the protagonists themselves, who now emerge as auteurs of this movement.7 While this image of friendship that I detect and summon here calls on idealistic ideas of bonds and trust, a couple of qualifiers to mitigate such facile effusiveness are in order. To note, none of these directors is a film school graduate; they have varying relationships to television and literature but, above all, they cherish a cinephile’s deep familiarity with the archive of Tamil cinema. They also share an unprecedented capacity and proclivity for retrieval tactics that stamps the culture of digital cinephilia. As mentioned in our programme notes for Cruel Cinema, this deep love of cinema courses through these films, taking on the obvious form of verbal and audio quotations; Rajinikanth’s films dominate, recurring in quotations of his bombastic, front-laden spectacles known for showcasing state-of-the-art special effects. Yet these new films, in and of themselves,

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demonstrate a measured estrangement from such star vehicles; the quotations are not overt homages, neither can they be described as loving inspiration. Rather, the varied presence of these star vehicle films from a refashioned studio system in the mise en scène of the independent films testifies to their ubiquity in the Tamil mediascape that these independent films explore, bolstering their naturalism. Conveying the promiscuous media ecology—that includes televisual streaming, cell phone clips, and scenes of movie outings to single and multiplex theatres, the new wave stands against the mainstream world of special effects—despite an archaic affection for what Kumararaja calls ‘the films of our childhood,’8 itself an updated declaration of Truffaut’s polemical slogan that decried the generation of French cinema prior to his own as ‘le cinema de papa.’9 In an ambience that celebrates films for friends, friends for film, with a breezy and eager camaraderie, the narratives of these films are rife with stories of betrayal, estrangement, and vengeance between friends, within gangs, and inside families. These wrought narratives ring through tropes associated with melodrama, noir, and capers. This is the irony that Subramaniapuram explores, rehearses, and delivers. For an independent movie, the film was surprisingly successful at the box office. It garnered considerable adulation on the critical front, can be said to have pioneered future films, and, with a backwards glance, has drawn earlier films by Bala, Sultan, and Selvaraghavan into its orbit. Hereafter they travel globally together as independent, underground, cult, sleeper hits—neo-noir, horror, fantastic, and unclassifiable films that are not necessarily in the modernist art house vein. The pull of the riptide of Tamil New Wave cinema is carried by trade winds blowing film cultures from Korea, the Philippines, France, and Italy, and picking up speed across Mexico and Brazil before crashing on the Coromandel coast.10 Shaped by the affordances of digital filmmaking, the three film works in this chapter—Subramaniapuram (2008), Araanya Kaandam (2010), and Veli (1995)—offer pleasures of slow reading dear to this cinephile and film scholar.

Subramaniapuram: Edge of Cruel Cinema To return to Subramaniapuram, post-curatorial, involves a recursive exercise that acknowledges subsequent scholarship by Anand Pandian, a volume published in both Tamil and English, comprehensively assembled

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with the shooting script.11 Written in the afterglow of the film’s box office success, the individual essays in the volume approach, with an exploratory scalpel, the film’s sartorial details indexing the 1980s: the series of posters that marked its zenith at 100 days of theatrical run, production details, and reception experiences—together these justifiably mark the canonical status of the film. But to a reader of the volume, the film stays as a closed, hermetic text—a mummified object on whose stillness the autopsy of scholarship relies. Yet reflections on film practice, however slight and stray, are scattered through the volume. Interviews with Rajan Kurai Krishnan and Pandian’s interlocutions with cinematographer S.R. Kathir arouse us out of this stillness and provoke us to attempt a sustained reading of the film through its animation of vitality and movement. This reading returns the favour of momentum that the film richly deserves into perpetuity. Holding onto the title, the first half of the film orients us to the eponymous neighbourhood, Subramaniapuram in Madurai, whose ambience—as Sasikumar reveals in his interview with Rajan Kurai Krishnan et al.—was accorded to a neighbourhood in Dindigul, Bharathipuram, that bore a resemblance to 1980s Madurai.12 Steadily, the film familiarizes us to the locality and its grid of alleyways in which the five unemployed lads—Azhagar, Paraman, Kaasi, Dopa, and Dumka—loiter. A telescoped shot of a skinny courtyard rehearses later encounters with Azhagar’s worried mother. Slushy, open sewage canals emerge as ideal spots for pranks, and at one point they pass by cut-out posters of Rajinikanth’s film being wheeled over a crossroad. A film poster of Manthopoo Killiye (1979), pasted on a wall, helps steer us through the maze of alleys. Frontal shots of a police station, where the lads are continually in and out of lockups, mark a perimeter at one end. At the other end is a movie theatre where the gang heads off to watch the Rajinikanth star film Murattu Kaalai (1980)—an outing that turns into a protracted brawl. The hangout spot that the clique uses for reposing, chatting, drinking, lurking, flirting, and listening to film songs turns out to be a corner shop that rents out public address (PA) systems and whose owner is roped into trading favours with these lads. A clear view of this corner shop, a spot primed for dust-ups, is from the vantage point of a balcony perched on an upper floor of the home of a certain member of the ruling political party, for whom these lads are conscripts, and whose drunken brawls and antics allow for a certain flourishing of lumpen behaviour that the politician has the power to exploit in his ambitious climb towards the office of the district president.13

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Flourishes of 1980s sartorial details, and a story that hinges on a culture of criminality within the politics of Madurai at that time, offer an overt reading of the film, one that is acknowledged and memorialized in wide critical praise and the many awards reaped, including several for S.R. Kathir’s cinematography (Fig. 5.2). Working on a shoestring budget, the original idea to use both 35mm and 16mm stock to differentiate the two time periods the film is set in (the current period brackets the film from 1980s Madurai) had to be jettisoned; in its place, the less expensive choice of deploying Kodak Super 16mm was embraced as the choice of medium. A blow up to 35mm produced grain across the frame. Despite initially attempting to minimize this grain, Kathir developed a preference for the unevenness produced, rationalizing that it would be suggestive of the 1980s, an analogue era; the overexposed image with deliberate graininess became a special effect that served to soften the bright shirts and the crispness of wide trousers and long collars. In resorting to this practice of shooting on Super 16mm followed by a blow up to 35mm, Kathir’s practice recollects long-held

Fig. 5.2 S.R. Kathir and Sasikumar on the set (Production still, courtesy S.R. Kathir)

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independent practices in celluloid globally, and in India specifically with Govind Nihalani’s 1980s films Aakrosh (1980) and Ardh Satya (1983) (Fig. 5.3).14 The acts of recollecting and remembering offer their own impetus, and in Subramaniapuram, the patchiness of the grain enlivens the image, undercutting the sharp distinctiveness of digital algorithms that freezes such movement across the frame. Kathir had honed his handheld camera work in a neo-noir urban thriller, Kattradhu Tamizh (2007). This debut

Fig. 5.3 S.R. Kathir at work (Courtesy S.R. Kathir)

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film by Ram received its critical due at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2018. The image of an amphitheatre, complete with an acoustic (echo) chamber and radials of alleyways, is how the film moves us through its setting, the neighbourhood of Subramaniapuram; we are taken along paths curved by long takes carved out by the cinematographer. There are echoes of ‘Cinema of the hood,’ which is one way of describing the film’s proximity to French language Banlieue Cinema, such as La Haine (1995), the favela setting of City of God (2002), and most evocatively, the slum in En Uyir Thozan (1990) in Tamil cinema—all touchstones of mise en scène style cinema.15 While hoodlums and street life establish thematic connectivity between the films that I classify as belonging in the ‘Cinema of the hood,’ a romantic plot line distinguishes Sasikumar’s film and opens it to an elaborate engagement with the archive of Tamil film songs. It is the promise of romance that has the camera following Azhagar’s flight out of Sithan’s corner shop on his bike with Paraman riding pillion towards the bus stop. At the appointed hour, we see passengers alighting in slow motion: boy— Azhagar, waits for girl—Thulasi, ducking and emerging from across the road. A cut ties the slow-motion sequence of the shot to a static shot grabbed from a camera placed at a high point that provides a direct line of sight down the far end of a road to spot Azhagar’s bike heading towards the vanishing point. From this still shot of straight lines and linear movements, the film cuts into a moving shot of the bike, the camera placed in tandem on another moving vehicle. Circumambulating through the alleyways and stalking the girl, the camera keeps pace with the bicycling lads, recording both short turns and large swerves through the alleyways, with handheld and other prosthetic devices, which emerge as Kathir’s signature across films. Alighting from the bike and settling into Sithan’s shop, the camera grazes over the gramophone to convey a diegetic play of the song ‘Siru Pon Mani Asaiyum’ (Little golden bells are tinkling) from the film Kallukkul Eeram/Moisture inside stone (1980). Noting the emphasis on the indexing of a period in the diegesis of Subramaniapuram that this gramophone record suggests, the sequencing of shots in the 2008 film stands in contrast to the deployment of tracking shots in the 1980 film; slow motion and mobile camera movement off the tracks offer the shape of revision through audio quotation, marking the present in discernibly anachronistic ways. Pegged in terms of Sundar Kali’s definition of a

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‘nativity film,’ Kallukkul Eeram embraces the romance of outdoor location shooting, achieving naturalism; however self-consciously, the film deploys the iconography of pastoralism in this song.16 Replacing wide vistas of village life of the 1980 film, Subramaniapuram moves the camera by curving and criss-crossing alleys throughout the entirety of this soundtrack quotation, calling on, in effect, an archive of Tamil film songs whose reanimation materializes as intermedial textures of independent filmmaking in the digital age. Orchestrated as a rehearsal of looks and exchanges between Thulasi and Azhagar, the music of the long-playing vinyl at Sithan’s shop conveys the grammar of the love song, sealing it as the lovers’ song, which plays again later on a radio when the lads visit Thulasi’s home. At the end of this full quotation on the audio track, the film cuts to an oblique angle of a television inside the local politician’s home, with which we have previously been familiarized. Huddled in front of it are the household’s children, their full attention devoted to the song and dance sequence ‘Koodaiyile Karuvadu’ (Dried Fish in the Basket) from Oru Thalai Ragam (1980); a handheld shot swings forwards and backwards to reveal Thulasi and her aunt on a swing also watching what we recognize as Oliyum Oliyum (Light and Sound), a programme on state-run television Doordarshan that assembled film songs, which was a distinctive feature of the mediascape of the late 1970s onwards. The misanthropic patriarch turns off the television, cutting short the intermedial expression of the film sequence, but it nevertheless conveys Subramaniapuram’s continuing excavation of a Tamil cinema archive beyond the codes of indexing the period. While it is unclear whether Oliyum Oliyum had access to recent releases on its programming roster, depending extensively on older films and past releases, the quotation here pushes us past this quibble to consider retrieval tactics from the archive of cinema in the age of television, such as sequences on a black-and-white television that move from one film to another, including the Hindi film Yaadon Ki Baaraat (1973). Additionally, the song and dance sequences lead us to the film Oru Thalai Ragam (1980) whose thematic preoccupations with college youth and romance resonate here. Snaking from vinyl to television, the film’s narrative relents finally to a movie outing for both the lads and Thulasi’s friends, the opening show of a Rajinikanth film that first appeared as an advertisement in the mise en scène: Murattu Kaalai/Rogue Bull (1980). A compact rendition of events has the film recording in sequential order the bustle of

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scalpers and touts who loiter at premiere screenings outside the movie theatre, followed by boisterous celebrations by fans at the film’s opening song inside the cinema against the projection on-screen, and finally the breakout for the interval that soon unravels into a gang fight in the hallways. The clipped pace of this outing with ellipses relies on our familiarity with such sequences and underscores an ongoing fascination for cinephile filmmakers with the romance of the premiere screening (as seen in Varma’s Rangeela [1995] and Satya [1998], Parthiban’s Housefull [1999] and J.P. Dutta’s Hathyar [1989]); likewise it encapsulates their renewed interest in the precincts of single-theatre movie halls as a setting in the era of multiplexes and digital cinemas (most poignantly rendered in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn [2003]).17 The projected films, surfacing as quotations, serve as a nod to their own archives infused with cinephilia, an homage that veers with considerable drive towards revisionism, thus contracting and protracting the select extracts. Subramaniapuram is no exception, as we have seen in its assortment of songs from films, song and dance sequences, and with the filming of the projection of Murattu Kaalia (1980), even absorbing the frame of the interval title card into its own film in a manner similar to the earlier channelling of the Kallukul Eeram soundtrack.18 While underscoring the 1980s as the period in the diegesis of the film, the absorption of these quotations, both as soundtrack and image, proposes more than an homage. It opens it to an antecedent style of film narration; spectres of another time bear on this film as it heralds the transition from analogue to digital. A brief excursion to my formulation of Indian popular cinema as a ‘cinema of interruptions’ seems justified, suggesting as it does a shift in film narrative style since the arrival of digital technologies; earlier I had consigned this to special effects spectacles in the book’s conclusion.19 Despite the interval’s continuing significance even with the commencement of non-linear editing in feature length films (without shaving this time-off from the duration of a film), we should not assume this to be a bulwark against change. Rather, as Subramaniapuram plays it out, the interval morphs in the age of database narrative, a concept finessed by Marsha Kinder in a pithy engagement with Lev Manovich’s database structure:

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This term refers to narratives whose structure exposes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and are crucial to language.20

In an additional finessing of Kinder’s pathbreaking conceptualization, Allan Cameron, focusing on contemporary cinema, offers ‘modular narratives’: These films, which I am calling ‘modular narratives,’ articulate a sense of time as divisible and subject to manipulation. (…) I suggest that contemporary modular narratives, however indirectly, address the rise of the database as a cultural form, while also gesturing towards broader shifts in the conceptualisation of time.21

Displaying the title card from Murattu Kaalai recalls an earlier style, with its drive towards precipitating the narrative at the interval; however, there is little indication of this pitch in Subramaniapuram with its aleatory narrative of recounting the skirmishes in long-drawn-out days at the corner shop. Pushing towards its own interval, the narrative gains momentum, with stakes rising as the lads begin working, under the directive of the politician, to murder the newly elected district president. When we hit the point of the ‘second’ interval, the film doubles back to the opening, indicating the present time in the diegesis, 2008, thus bracketing the events of 1980. One interval haunts the other, prodding us to decipher the sequencing of events in the logic of cause and effect between 1980 and 2008, and thereby drawing us into the narrative drive of a crime drama edging towards the diaristic. Out of the grid, out of centripetal pathways towards the district president’s home with its view of the corner shop, and outwards centrifugally, the narrative unravels after the interval with an attentiveness to continuity; it resumes in the hospital in Madurai 2008 where the first part of the film ended. From a long take of the intravenous tube strapped to the patient, a wipe swipes us into the 1980s, and lands us into a police investigation into the murder of the local politician. On the run and at large, two of the five lads—Paraman and Azhagar—lead us from one new location to another, sketching settings that decidedly have the film leaving Subramaniapuram. From the court, where they surrender to police custody, the film cuts to a jail where they meet another gangster, Ravi, who offers to bail them out in exchange for their services as foot soldiers in his gang on

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the outside. If Dindigul doubled as the Madurai of the 1980s, a prison in Andhra Pradesh, according to Kathir, offered the location for scenes of incarceration—given the prevailing prohibition against filming inside jails in Tamil Nadu, and the film’s own insufficient budget to mount a set. Following their release from jail, we watch Paraman and Azhagar redrawing their dominion. At night, rather than engaging in drunken brawls that somewhat comedically spill through religious processions, as seen earlier in the film, the lads’ nocturnal occupation is now one of revenge. We see them scaling the walls of the politician’s home, climbing down into the courtyard to ferret out Kanagu who framed them for murder. Their aggression is mitigated by screams of frightened women from behind locked doors, including those of Thulasi who offers cover to her uncle unbeknownst to the men. The rush on the house (whose approach so far has been—for the lads only through the front doors, and for us viewers of the family drama—no further than the living room and balcony) now implodes the spatial arrangement of cordons. Another geography opens up in the film with no recognizable grid to guide us and steadily opens new settings: a leather tannery is the rendezvous point with Ravi for an initial recruitment to his ranks, and in cotton mills they hide their long knives. A fight scene takes place in a clubhouse, with screens partitioning several games of chance in progress, which the camera approaches from above while the lads try clearing from below. Clothes on a line in a communal washing area interfere with jabs during another fight scene. Ducking into an unfamiliar home becomes the last refuge for Azhagar, on the run through a maze of neighbourhood lanes with men on his tail. Returning Ravi’s favour, by carrying out a hit to settle a blood feud, takes the lads through a market’s narrow lanes to a new neighbourhood that the shooting script names as a slum. Joining a funeral procession, with digressions to a home and public toilet, and onwards to a cemetery at the edge of the locality, leads us to where Parman and Azhagar corner the victim. After ambushing and murdering their victim, the lads’ escape route in a speedy auto-rickshaw does not have them return to their usual spot, but even further afield. Through a dispersal of settings with no end in sight, the spatialization of momentum, post-interval, has the narrative enacting a labyrinthine structuring, a concept I borrow from Angela Ndalianis’s schema of the pathways undertaken by contemporary entertainment with the advent of digital technologies.22 Disorienting when listed, the never-ending march of settings conveys the gang having ‘lost their ground’—as succinctly

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offered by Kathir to my observation of this centripetal spin out.23 Yet it appears that the expansion of locales, which emerges post-interval, prefigures earlier in the film, most pointedly in the subplot of the love story that finds its fulsome expression in two songs. In a film suffused with quotations of such sequences, in television programming of film songs that renders these interruptions discrete, its own sound design responds to the possibilities of database cinema by delivering two of the four songs in a modular format for the post-television age. Riding the current zeitgeist of modular narratives, the choreography of the two love songs serves up anachronisms by expanding the space of action beyond the grid of the neighbourhood. Through an intercutting rhythm, the film steadily moves Thulasi and Azhagar out of the familiar settings of the area into newer locales, where chance and opportunity of encounters seals their love in the song ‘Kangal Irandal’ (With Just Two Eyes) sung as a duet. Here we see the vistas of hillocks on the periphery of the town, feasts at temples in the ‘sacred groves’ on the perimeter, portraitures among ruins of a palace, and the pillared hallways of Meenakshi temple. Digital effects heighten their presence and absence in compositions through cut-outs and compositing that injects happenstance between the lovers; newer spaces and easy coincidences shape the expression of love through slow motion effects in spaces beyond the crime ridden grid of the neighbourhood. By contrast, the second love song plays out as the inverse of the first: doom and longing separate the couple. Striking a distance from the discreteness heightened in digital editing and favoured by television programming, the film integrates the song into the narrative of crime by conjoining imprisonment for the friends and separation of the lovers. Choreographed to suggest separation and reunion, ‘Kadhal Siluvaiyil’ (On Love’s Cross), sung by a Shankar Mahadevan, intercuts between Thulasi’s despondency and Azhagar’s endurance in prison. The song stops halfway to return to the film’s story, and a cut to the jail where we find Paraman and Azhagar being befriended by Ravi. When it resumes, the song matches Thulasi’s despair, as she remains in their locality while Azhagar languishes in prison, and then thrusts the couple onwards into yet newer spaces. Enclosed in familiar yet distinct spaces, to convey separation, the couple finally unite in a conjuring initiated from Azhagar’s point of view: Thulasi materializes in prison and disappears as he chases after her. Through a maze of alleys in locales we haven’t seen earlier in the film, Azhagar looks for Thulasi, whose presence and erasure conveys the

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impression of a haunting; digital compositing embellishes the impression of the uncanny.24 If previously, the alleyways of Subramaniapuram were complicit in the blossoming of their romance, the couple’s current estrangement finds reunion in Azhagar’s reverie in hitherto unseen knots of lanes and passages, thus manifesting romantic longing as spatial torques. Production stories of chancing upon the location uncannily tie with the lovers’ plight, within the picturization of a single song. It was in their return car journey from Andhra Pradesh to Chennai, after the completion of the shoot in the jail, that Kathir recalls urging Sasikumar to take a detour through a village in Kadapa district for a quick reconnaissance: a setting for a different location for this song, yet one that bears resemblance to Subramaniapuram.25 Set in a region with layered histories of architecture, including prehistoric rock paintings, one of the villages was also marked by an imposing structure of a stone water-tank built by the British after the region was ceded by the Nizam in the early nineteenth century. The tower with its passageways leading up to the turret materializes as an ideal conduit for a game of hide and seek in Azhagar’s ruminations. Picturing his reunion with Thulasi set in spaces unseen, the film casts the imprisoned lover as guileless, and his own fatal ending prefigures in this song. Choreographing Azhagar’s search for Thulasi through a maze, labyrinthine motifs unfold in the song and dance interruption that routinely distend space and time. As a standard feature of popular cinema, and for a long time the place of spectacle, this device weaves and wends through different formats. In this sequence and at this juncture in the narrative, spatial disorientation beset by a multicursal maze in the middle of the interruption ripples in both directions—before and after—heightening the embedded labyrinthine possibilities that non-linear editing adroitly supplies. Kathir’s handheld cinematography interlaces with Raja Mohammed’s editing, a collaboration that recalls the structuring of flashbacks and slow-motion shots in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989). This was executed on an analogue editing console with laborious attention to outcomes in optical printing by the editor Renu Saluja to heighten the tension between the gangster vengeance plot and the love story.26 In retrospect, Saluja’s signature anticipates the variances of non-linear editing programmes, machine-coded options.27 The spectre of that intercutting rhythm from Parinda resurfaces in this crime narrative as well. Raja Mohammed extends shot duration and breaks step with analogue rhythms of intercutting by drawing in more and more locations, throwing us as

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viewers out of the grid of Subramaniapuram into an endlessly unfolding labyrinthine map, where Azhagar’s entrance and Thulasi’s exit are far from diagrammed. In the horizontal unspooling of the film, passageways and alleyways in newer locations literalize the evocation of a maze, doubling as the alleys of Subramaniapuram that Sasikumar and Kathir both recognized during their reconnaissance; this serves to heighten the effects of apparitions and the uncanny that eventually spelt doom for the lads. Choices are indeed made in crime narratives against love, and towards death and vengeance. Thrown asunder, towards the end of the film Azhagar succumbs to a trap that Thulasi unwittingly sets up with her uncle’s henchmen at a rendezvous point in the perimeter of the town, among the tall terracotta sentinels—a place of feasting in happier times. Paraman too, at the end, walks out into the open sandy beaches of the river and tall rushes at the outreaches of the town, only to court betrayal by his own friend Kaasi. Expelled, ostracized, betrayed, and doomed, the two friends meet their end away from the dominion of the corner shop in Subramaniapuram. The temporal folds into a labyrinthine structure that moves to 2008 for a final act of revenge in the film: Dumka’s closing act of pulling the plug on Kaasi’s oxygen flow. Subramaniapuram’s constriction and distension of spaces of action, and the several folds of time, revises crime narratives that are routinely plagued with facile plots of betrayal and loyalty, an achievement in style that accounts for its critical acclaim and cult status. Overt homages ripple through Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) and Rajeev Ravi’s Kamatipaadam (2016); and a studied engagement in Angamalay Diaries (2017) points to exchanges and flows between Malayalam and Tamil independent cinemas that have been distinct for a long time, despite entangled production histories for the first half century of these cinemas. That Sasikumar himself would retreat to less ambitious projects since then suggests he carries the burden of hitting his stride as a director too early, and perhaps accidentally. Let us end here with the closing shot of the film: the camera holds still at one end of a hospital veranda as Dumka walks steadily with the gait of polio affliction from middle to far-ground. It is a long take that has the camera steadfastly keeping time with the walk, slower than most, yet the sentimental closure with the last surviving lad is not what I want to dwell on; rather, it is the stillness of the camera. That which has for long been pulling and bending curves in the geography of action, ends on the count of duration, its own movement, or lack thereof, of little

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consequence. We close on the events of 2008, whose periodic insertions, in darker hues of rain-drenched days or in fluorescent hospital rooms, undercut the impression of encasement as a bracketing device. Such a spectral presence of the future in 1987 throws ‘time out of joint.’ It is an arrangement that expands upon digital editing, giving pause to linear recounting, and underscores the present as the originator of style and voice.28 Kathir’s cinematography, which defines the style of Subramaniapuram, offers us an instance of quiet, of equal length to the earlier shooting of disconcertion, as a sign-off.

Aaranya Kaandam and Neo-Noir My first viewing of Aaranya Kaandam (2010/2011) was as picture perfect as it could be for a cinephile at a film festival. Programmed at the London Asian Film Festival, June 2011, the film was screened at a multiplex off Piccadilly with a wide screen, curved to a narrow row of seats—an arrangement by the entertainment industries in Britain that understands that the size of the screen in no way requires diminution to accommodate the smallish yet varied audiences at such venues. The programming was attuned to the changing tide of the independent scenes in India, far beyond Bombay cinema, by showcasing films that were on the margins of the commercial film industries in Chennai and Kolkata, and whose fates in the commerce of exhibition were tied to film festival circuits. Foregoing these films in London therefore would not have guaranteed me a viewing in India, in large part due to their protracted battles with the Board of Censors or falling out of favour with the entrenched taste of film distributors; the cinephile’s fervour for the archive takes on additional urgency with independent Indian films at such niche festivals. Such has been the destiny of many of Q’s (Quashiq Mukherjee) films— made in Kolkata yet seen elsewhere. In 2011 his signature of revising cult cinema straining towards exploitation genre, assumed the form of Gandu (2010), a Bengali rap film in its own right that was grafted onto seedier aspects of family melodrama. His performance as director de rigueur for contemporary independent cinemas overtook the programming that year with an added emphasis on music-show crossovers; he paired up with Susheela Raman, a British Indian musician with a yen for popularizing the structural rigour of Carnatic music. Slated as the centrepiece of the festival, Anurag’s Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur Part One and Part Two, turned out to be the embodiment of

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bloated ambition. The title card, ostensibly ‘dedicated to the boys from Madurai,’ leaves little doubt as to Kashyap’s appreciation for this same Tamil New Wave that I had observed appearing in Bala’s films, sharpened into focus in Ameer Sultan’s Paruthiveeran, and reaching its apotheosis with Subramaniapuram. Set in the dusty landscapes of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Kashyap’s film, through its generous tribute, draws kinship with my own term, ‘Cruel Cinema’; several of the films fitting my notion of this term are set in the arid landscapes surrounding Madurai.29 Cruel Cinema is a rhizomatic conception that subtends the linguistic boundaries of mainstream, through subterranean circuits of evaluation that privilege hearsay and irreverence. Kashyap’s two-part film overtly mimics Tarantino’s and Miramax’s marketing strategy of delineation and prolongation for Kill Bill, one clear influence for the film. This being the case, Gangs essentially closes off the Cruel Cinema strain in Tamil cinema. But, with such unexpected foreclosures and openings in cycles of independent films, certain themes and styles continue to persist so as to suggest a long ending whose finale is yet to come. This is evident in recent releases: Rajeev Ravi’s Malayalam film Kammattipaadam (2016) and Sasikumar’s home production, Kidaari (2016), directed by Prasath Murugesan. To note the maturation of Cruel Cinema with the box office success and critical acclaim accorded to Subramaniayam, and its eventual moratorium in Gangs of Wasseypur, turned out to be more of a handicap than an advantage for my first viewing of Aaranya Kaandam; better to have shrugged off these homages and relays between films for this first viewing, in hindsight. The dark coolness of interiors and the wide shots of landfills in north Madras industrial wastelands jolted me out of the dusty terrains of feudal dramas and plunged me into the urban decay familiar from neonoir with inflections of Raakh (1989); unmistakably, neo-noir had arrived in Tamil cinema. Well into the year, summer of 2012 to be precise, when Aaranya Kaandam was cited for a potential remake in Hindi by Sriram Raghavan, that director demurred quipping: ‘…its perfect! Why would I want to remake it?’ (Fig. 5.4)30 Set against futures not realized, and despite gaining a festival shine, the film barely ran a week in its own territory of Chennai and its environs, scuttled into oblivion by a producer’s short-sightedness and his protracted battles with the director. ‘It was ahead of its times,’ mused Nalan Kumarasamy of Kumararaja’s film, who had seen it not in the theatre but in a contraband version on an online site.31 No sooner had it

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Fig. 5.4 Kumararaja on the set of Aaranya Kaandam (Courtesy Kumararaja Thiagarajan)

died in the conventional circuits of a theatrical run, Aaranya Kaandam succeeded in being resurrected through surreptitious circulations. That was how I next saw it in a communal setting, this time at Pure Cinema, August 2016. Tucked away above a bookstore that also doubles as a media activist space, the large room with two whirring air conditioners seated nearly two hundred people, whose rapt attention on a corrupted DVD projection of the film sustained two breakdowns without a protest. One extended intermission brought on by corruption of the disk had the convener, Arun, playing sections of a Vijay TV version of the film, which moved with a vastly varied sequencing of pixelated images—additional evidence of the different platforms that the film has been played on since its brief theatrical life. During the discussion post-screening, it became even more apparent that the film’s circulation online, which effectively shattered the film into random sequences, had done more than its share in creating an aura around the film’s original form, a form that had for so long lain outside the grasp of film lovers. This elusiveness helped secure Aaranya

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Kaandam’s status as a classic cult film, whose furtive availability made it even more beguiling for cinephiles, creating a cult of remembrance. A reverential frisson sizzled through the room; some attendees confessed to having already watched clips, or all of the film, through streaming devices on computers and smart-phones. Others’ attendance there that evening was prodded on by the film’s notoriety, the conduit for cinephiles. All, however wide the extent of their awe, were left wondering about the premature disappearance of the film. To both the seasoned and novice cinephile, the fragility of the DVD as a format for the digital coding offered a trace of the film; its full restoration would be a project for the future, but its potential to astound was in no way depleted. This disparate array of formats, which overshadowed the exhibition, now intrudes on every viewing, every moment of quiet intimacy with the film, in different times and places. These discrepancies ricochet into the film’s own rehearsals in the narrative, when similar devices appear in its mise en scène that human protagonists fiddle with: tuning in and out of radio frequencies, encircling the blue screen light of a television, and responding to the insistent ring of a cellphone on-screen. In this feature length film, sighting of these formats calibrates the narrative so as to warrant their occurrences as intermedial punctuations that reroute energies of the film hither and thither, and, by extension, redesigning the neo-noir. The film’s overture ushers in a handheld camera roving through a room, curving its right angles with smooth swishes and swings that add up to a long take. Other arcs compete with the camera and materialize as a patterned wallpaper of swirls covering the walls of the room: tile by title, vertically and horizontally, black concentric circles swirl against an ochre background. Somewhere in the sweep of the camera we spot a bathroom door ajar, from which a young woman emerges to slip on a blouse and pleat her sari in a corner. In this dimly lit room, with dark recesses and swirling patterns on the wall, the stealthy moves of an older man persist, despite the protests of his prey; her conscription as his mistress questions the issue of volition in such captivity narratives; it turns out be a key plot line in a film about gangsters on the run and a sack of cocaine at large. Filming the movements of grabbing and groping, the camera records the man getting his way on the bed, but when his vitality fails him, the long take ends. To mount a fiction of synchrony, I wish to propose that the duration of the long take borrows from the length of a

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song that pipes into the room and plays in medias res, its source uncertain but its decibel audible to both us and to the protagonist with his unwelcome braggadocio. A second song blares out with a verve that the protagonist (an apparently aging don, Singaperumal, who is deferentially referred to as Ayya) finds unwelcoming, and he lumbers out of the bed and swings open a door onto another room to bellow at his entourage, who obediently turn down the volume. Functioning as sound leaks, the songs suggest propinquity, and offer a measure of the distance to an off-screen sound source, a radio in an adjacent room where the gang hangs out. Conventions of realism are in easy supply here. A legible orchestration of elements and set pieces of a global neo-noir surface in the film—(Baradwaj Rangan’s report in The Hindu is the most recent to enumerate the film’s various quotations) the insertions open other portals beyond adjacent rooms and the diegesis of the film.32 Swishing and circling through a room, the camera’s long take absorbs the strains of ‘Aattathil Naane’ from Paadum Vaanampadi (1985), a Tamil remake of the Hindi film Disco Dancer (1982) that retains the original song as composed by the music director Bappi Lahiri. The credit for the second song, ‘Tholin Mele,’ that appears to mock the don, is acknowledged as a remixed song from the 1982 film Ninaivellam Nithya. Once I had gotten a taste of the practice of soundtrack quotations, I was hooked and with the purposeful intent of an archaeologist and the high of an addict, every song had to be nailed down. A collaborative venture unfolded, with Kumararaja’s graciousness on the play and stop functions of the DVD player, and me facing my own shortcomings on lacking the wherewithal to locate the provenance of each one of the songs on my own. Detecting quotations of images is one matter for the cinephile: songs however require another form of expertise altogether. To listen and become attuned to the soundtrack entailed forsaking sequencing of images and narrative drive, a different way of moving through the work. A linear direction to my detection commenced with scant regard for image or plot. On the car radio, as the gang heads out of the cramped quarters of Ayya’s home towards Pondicherry, driving through the peripheral routes of an industrial landscape, we hear a riff that serves as a sound bridge from the Tamil film Thai Veedu/Maternal Home (1983). The fine-tuning of the radio by a gang member takes us to another station; this song’s correct citation, insists Kumararaja, belongs to Bappi

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Lahiri for the original Hindi film music and whose remake was delivered into Tamil by Shankar Ganesh. At a wayside coffee shop blaring from a speaker (though the cocked heads of the gang suggest the possibility that they are watching a music video TV programme) is the song ‘Ponmeni Uruguthe’ from Moondram Pirai (1982); this elicits the memory of the dancer Silk Smita, as commented on by the gang. Songs recede to playing as background ambience when the film introduces two drunks at a fleabag hotel, whose low wagers on a cockfight and high stakes of a cocaine transaction drown out lines from Thanikattu Raja (1982). This streams in from somewhere contiguous and connects it to the gang arriving at the teashop. On the way to the cockfight, as the camera follows Ayya, we hear a song from Yaaradi Nee Mohini (2008), the Tamil remake of Selvaraghavan’s Telugu film Aadavari Matalaku Arthale Verule (2007) called ‘Oru Nalaikul Ethanai Kanavu.’ Here, the nod is to a contemporary filmmaker, a peer, in the independent filmmaking scene of Chennai. As a gesture of laddish nonchalance to distract the cops at the checkpoint from the internal drama in the car (the five have just been instructed over the phone by Ayya to kill Pasupathy), the gang tunes into a robust title song ‘Kaattu Vazhi Pora’ from Malaiyoor Mambattiyan (1983), originally sung by Ilyaraja. On Ayya’s zigzag return from the cockfight, as he passes through alleyways and past rooftops, we hear faint notes of a song blaring from a public address system or a television programme: ‘Mambazhathu Vandu’ from Sridhar’s Sumaithangi (1962). In contrast, ‘Agaram Ippo Sigaram’ from Ananthu’s Sigaram (1991) composed by S.P. Balasubramanyam and sung by K.J. Yesudas, streams in from a neighbouring spot when the drunken father and son walk out of the cockfight and wander through streets with the stash of cocaine. The sequence was spliced together as one long stretch matched to the song in a time defying geography that starts at a small shopping complex on T. H. Road in Tondiarpet, heads towards Sowcarpet, and lands in the environs of Zaam Bazaar in Triplicane. Back in the bedroom, Subbu engages in a tryst with Sappai, her one friend from the gang. We see its completion in a scene of post-coital repose, a still shot in which a television streaming a song holds their rapt attention. A more pointed engagement between the nascent lovers and the reigning male stars—Rajinikanth, Kamal Hassan, and Vijayakanth— is prompted by television programming of a song from Bharathiraja’s Tamil cult film 16 Vayathinile (1977). In addition to these songs is

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A.R. Rahman’s ‘Jai Ho’ from Slumdog Millionaire (2008) whose bass-line surfaces intermittently in the film. The insertions of film songs, a figuration of intermediality, marshals a distinctive line-up that draws from Kumararaja’s deep familiarity with songs, remakes, and remixes; their identification challenges the most devout of cinephiles who can barely keep up with these quotations, which reveal the vastness of a cinema song archive whose depths are merely hinted at. If there is a sense of incredulity and exhaustion of details on behalf of the reader, at this feat of having nailed down almost every song, film, musician, or singer, the effort of burrowing is well worth it. Under no circumstance whatsoever could have I have pinned down the songs by searching Google, or known of their histories of remakes and attribution, had it not been for Kumararaja’s initial response to my query on the provenance of the first two songs and his immense enthusiasm for the possibilities of showcasing his favourite songs. This style of cinephilia, I suggest, emerges from the wide archive of Indian cinemas, and an endeavour that emerges from both television viewing and online retrieval practices. To clarify, the quotations of songs in the diegesis suggest both radio and television programming that index an established convention of severance from their original location in a film, in curatorial practices; the connoisseurship of film songs circulates separately from the narrative, irrespective of the evaluation of, or affection for, the latter. A finessing of this extraction reaches its zenith in Kumararaja’s film. While indexing contemporary mediascapes, the particular playlist of songs in the film displays Kumararaja’s curatorial presentation that runs the gamut from winking at in-jokes, to harbouring secret affections, and favours recycling over issuing new sequences. With the facility afforded by digital programmes of extraction and insertion, which underwrite ethics of open source in the dominion of intellectual property laws, Aaranya Kaandam performs an archiving cinema—a term I rework from Catherine Russell’s careful parsing of Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010–11) as ‘archival cinephilia.’33 While neither as relentless as, nor literal to, the idea of timing as Marclay’s work is, Kumararaja’s practice of retrieval bears an uncanny resemblance to such practices of audio recycling, with a particular gloss on Hindi and Tamil song tunes that are widely available with the advent of digital cinema, yet it deserves stating that it defies decoding by digital search engines. What was for a long time an artisanal practice

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of expanded cinema in the age of celluloid is now flattened across digital algorithms. It bears asking the fate of the song and dance sequences, my cinema of interruptions, in such a cinema, and of this film in particular, saturated as it is with songs from elsewhere—emitting faint strains on the soundtrack for effects of ambient sound, or blaring through radios and televisions to solicit a character’s notice. It appears that in the face of shifting promises and constricting budgets, two song sequences in the original script had to be dispensed with.34 A strapped financial situation often begets experimentation and this film is no exception. Retaining the contract of the spectacle, which exudes with song and dance sequences in popular cinema, Aaranya Kaandam choreographs Pasupathy’s getaway from the police, and his run towards rescuing his wife before his former gang members reach her. The digitally edited sequence has him running slowly and then speeding through spaces, covering ground with expansive leaps and bounds. At times the green screen registers variable speeds across the screen through compositing, such as children and water balloons. Such flamboyant, gravity-defying stunts in digital effects are now easily discernible in action films globally, and this work emphasizes the impression of timing by alternating between scenarios that are at considerable distance from each other; a rhythm of simultaneity between four scenarios heightens the heat of a chase. At the normal speed that we are accustomed to, the film draws in scenes of the gang kidnapping Kasturi, Ayya wending his way through back alleys to a cockfight, and back at the main house, Sappi and Subbu appear to have made the best of a hothouse situation by having sex and watching television. These disparate leaps through time and space are combined to convey the episodic charge of a unitary segment, displaying codes and conventions associated with song and dance sequences whose absence is most obvious and sorely missed. In a film that has freely and generously paid homage to a distinct palette, by poaching and quoting music, the lack of its own original song that would in turn circulate over other mediums shadows the digital effects so as to produce the aesthetics of an unfinished film. Against the expected smoothness of digital effects, these renditions of pixilation and minimal sound effects, offer pause to the erasure of Tamil cinematic style in the age of the digital: digital noise, a spatialization of an acoustic absence, a style in its own right. A relay of special effects volleys between the wide-open spaces of Pasupathy’s heroic run, through roads and alleyways, to the cloistered

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room of a clandestine cockfight; these offer a relationship of obverses in lighting and equivalences in the overt presentation of digital compositing, metaphors emanating from the blood sport, equally pertinent. Details from practice narrate a story of numbers that trailed shooting the cockfight: three sets of cockerels of varying heights, sixteen to eighteen hours of shootings, a hundred shots of fights, and seven to eight versions of cockfight sequences assembled. Yet no rooster was killed. In the final version, CGI effects convey this through slow motion thrusting and retracting of spurs, with vertical effects of floating feathers and splattering blood. This cockfight presented multiple challenges for Kumararaja: first it was to abide by the Board of Censors’ regulations, and those issued by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) that bans the cruelty of animals on film shoots as well as an overriding ban on cockfights. In addition, actor Jackie Shroff—as a member of PETA—had personal misgivings being included in a scene depicting a blood sport. The hustle of waging and provocations ringing through the cockfight on the soundtrack find their pitch in choreographed CGI effects—a rooster fight rendered through a play of scales in digital—whose relationship to the pro-filmic is not indexical, thus clearing censor board regulations without reprimands on this sequence. Pure digital effect! Without the constraints of censorship or evoking the trace of a song, other fight sequences—one after the interval and the other towards the end of the film—heighten the deployment of digital effects with the protracted time of slow motion, and vertical motions verging on black wire stunts; speed of movement and shape of space transform with the arrangement of algorithms. These exhilarating elaborations of variations in speed, gravity-defying movements of fighters, and an endless supply of fighters that have come to stay—from Mission Kashmir (2000), as initially cited by Sean Cubitt, to Rajinikanth blockbusters since the mid-1990s, and even in independent films such as this one—are affordable with, and afforded by, the digital.35 In plain view of such absorption and rearrangement of spectacle in this film, another form of algorithm surfaces in lieu of three-dimensional song and dance sequences: videogame. Scripted in the original as a full-scale song sequence emitting from Sappai’s Gameboy, the finished sequence fills our screen through a wipe, and proceeds with Subbu’s thumbing and navigating the rightwards scroll, thereby saving a two-dimensional couple from volleys of shots, sudden roadblocks, and wide crevices, only to have a spaceship drop vertically and lift the couple from further obstacles at

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the end of the game. The truncated two-dimensional game, inserted without interruption, stands out in contrast to the film’s overall preference for three-dimensional imaging; nevertheless, features of what Henry Jenkins coined ‘narrative architecture’ in his consideration of video games, transposes into the film’s aesthetics both before and after its location.36 Pasupathy’s second run from a hired hit man, a sequence after the interval and before the game, has him running through alleyways, racing across rooftops, and soaring over chasms between buildings, actions that mimic the gameplay of both two-dimensional and three-dimensional sidescrolling games. Through digitally manipulated slow motion effects, a 2D game gains power through a configuration of 3D topographies: alleyways extend and spaces warp through variable speeds between Pasupathy and Muthu, the hired hit. Slow motion is punctuated further by moments of motionlessness: fluttering pigeons stilled in mid-flight; and a spray of water, with droplets large to the eye, are suspended in their downward curve. When aligned through compositing, differential speeds in depths of field emerge within one frame—water droplets move differently from Pasupathy’s backwards glance—and throw open the wide canvas of possibilities of motion through space in digital editing that, in this case, traces over the template of a video game. The interactive mechanics of the side-scrolling game that advances by the player thumbing leftwards to avoid obstacles is a distinctive feature of video games across platforms; this facility finds its own incarnation in the film’s long ending. At stake in the acceleration of the storyline is the exchange of a sack of cocaine for a bag of money, which relays as opportunism between hapless drunks, and escalates into gang war and mutiny in the ranks. In tandem is the captivity narrative that casts Subbu and Sappai’s lot with the fortunes of the gang and whims of the ageing don; their hopes of escape find inspiration through the gameplay of video games—to confiscate two of the three guns that pass through the circuits of protection and defence in the film. This short circuit deems an exchange between guns and money. In a showdown in the bedroom, predicated on twists and turns, Sappai guns down the don and Subbu targets Sappai. Playing innocent, she slips out of Pasupathy’s grip, and while he commandeers his former mates as his foot soldiers, Subbu makes good on the plan she devised with Sappai by retrieving the bag of money left for safekeeping at the corner store. Out of the house, a handheld camera records her walking through the narrow alley of Kappu Lane, rendered in slow motion and through conventions of match on action

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continuity: moving back to note her move forward and then following her as she wends her way to the crossing at the road, her voice-over expressing the bravado of having outwitted the men. In a replay of one such earlier outing with Sappai, where she narrowly escapes from a speeding vehicle, we hear sounds of a screeching truck and see on-screen her shocked expression in still frame. The screen turns black and the next frame is the nose of a truck towards the camera in exceedingly slow motion, before the frame blacks out yet again. The following frame has us situated from the vicinity of the side steps of the truck to watch, again in extreme slow motion, Subbu narrowly escaping collision by stepping back, and the film closes with her walking into the sunset with her loot. With the near miss of the accident, the film offers the distensions possible in digital editing that, as we see, subtend accidents by ‘ramping’ speed of slow-motion shots in sequences and string together images whose continuity relies on compositing through green screens. In contrast to the movement of images in analogue editing, where such deterrence would have been impossible to convey, Aaranya Kaandam adopts the characteristic nippiness of videogames as the preferred mode of presenting obstacles and then dodging them. Subbu’s saving emerges as a gameplay on the editing console, changing ideas of accidents and misses whose pacing we have grown accustomed to in the time of analogue. Such slowing down of a film recalls practices of close readings, in a manner obverse. Raymond Bellour’s close reading of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), for instance, has him watching the 35mm film on the editing table against the projection speed of 24 frames per second.37 A different film emerges under such a frame by frame scrutiny: Marnie looking straight at the mirror shows up as a vivid image that barely registers in its theatrical projection; speculation of narcissistic identification dates Bellour’s conclusion but not his mode of reading closely. Another one of Hitchcock’s films was seized by Douglas Gordon and turned into a video installation work, 24 hours Psycho, whose extravagant rendering of the analogue version amplifies the notion of slow motion in the digital age. Such projects echo in this reading of Aaranya Kaandam’s ending, whose absorption of gameplay strategies redoubles the potential of intermedial figurations to favour a nihilistic attitude towards money, and a liberating, rather than a punitive, ending for its female protagonist. It is the closure of the film, before the ending, that carries resonances of Henry Jenkins’ pithy formulation of the narrative of architecture in video games. In this explanatory flashback that ties up all the loose ends,

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we are back in the familiar contours of the bedroom where Ayya has just emerged from the bathroom and asks aloud who called his phone. In an off-screen space, we hear the clanking of pots and pans suggestive of a kitchen, whose existence we had little inkling of so far in the film. When Ayya discovers that his stash of money is missing, the handheld camera following him swings rightwards to reveal the wide alcove of a kitchen with Subbu close by. The bedroom expands to include that space, and in that new opening, the film impels further options by having Subbu pick up a gun hidden in one of the pots. Reviewing and rewinding the film places this gun in the drawer of a table in the torture room on the floor below. To open into new rooms at the height of a resolution, to introduce objects whose prior presence has us returning to earlier sections of the film, and to play along with a new set of environmental conditions are part of the gameplay that this film adopts in its enunciation of the neo-noir. Video games are not just discrete inserts but their strategies at outwitting the viewer become part of the film’s narrative. That we do not flinch at such introductions reveals the extent to which the film’s revisionism of noir bears digital accents in its assemblage of intermediality. It is not smoothened over but enlivened through connections between mediums. Responding to my observation that my sense of having been taken for a ride through spaces unseen are the mechanisms of ludology, Kumararaja told me that the film’s opening shot, the blank screen, is the dark room of the kitchen from where the handheld camera emerges and all else follows.38 It appears we have come full circle, folded into and doubled back to the very beginning of the film. Additionally, another reckoning of time opens and closes the film. A title card in the post-credit shot at the beginning posits a query credited to Chanakya, a philosopher from 400 bce: ‘What is Dharma?’ At the end of the film, the query reappears and this time the answer delivers as another title card: ‘Whatever satiates you.’ Notwithstanding the obvious reading of the film as a parable, if one were to read the entire film as a response to the initial title card, I would say such folding back to philosophical treatises in the age of the digital medium ushers in notions of epochs, both fantastical and actual, that scholars have deemed to be a feature of the baroque turn in digital. With all the caveats of translation in place it seems that such folds and leaps of time allow us to discern similar twists in this film, whose conceit of a diurnal set of events exceeds real time in favour of duration: baroque accents in a ‘Madras noir.’

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Since the question of medium specificity seems to circle the discussion so far, some questions of the material conditions of production are in order. A collaboration on advertisement shoots between Kumararaja and cinematographer P. S. Vinod made this passage to feature film obvious, and a mixing of different formats, bolstering the aesthetics of intermediality, assembled the film: Super 35 and Arriflex 435 cameras for the most part; some shots in digital SI2K; Super 16mm for high-speed shots, 500 frames per second; Kodak 200 and 500T stock. Against the pace of digital sequences that were doctored post-production, a different kind of medium specificity also requires exploring here, images that emerge from long takes and often favouring wide panorama shots. That the long take would literally take form from both handheld cameras and jib cranes to mimic free movement through space, develops as one kind of gesture, but there are other shots that favour wide screen compositions with unexpected stillness. An altercation between the gang driving to Pondicherry and the police at the check post has the camera moving further away from the human figures, and in this distancing a landscape of the perimeter of the city emerges: tall coconut trees in the arid landscape of north Chennai/Madras recalling the bank of electricity pylons we saw earlier, as the gang drove outwards from Oragadam, a locale south of Tambaram. A little later, Pasupathy’s run from a rival gang has the camera pulling back to show us, in an extreme long and wide shot, a landfill steaming in the heat of smouldering fires: the toxic space of Kodungayur. As the narrative moves into the city, a cartography of landmarks of north Madras reveals itself. A broken clock tower in Royapettah turns out to be a rendezvous point for the exchange of heroin and money. The tall water tower at Port Trust receives a slow telescopic tunnelling with wide zoom lens during a day of outing. A short of an underpass of commuter trains captures Parry’s Corner. A father and son wandering through Zaam Bazaar and Sowcarpet after the cockfight. A chase through the rubble of an abandoned factory of Binny Mills in Perumbur Chulai leads to the final showdown in a similar complex—Binny Mills in Meenambakakam. A rusted car among razed buildings in a neighbourhood between Royapuram and Kasimedu turns out to be the kid’s ideal hiding spot for the stash of cocaine. These settings reside alongside the duration of exterior shots of Ayya’s home, a typical 1930s Madras deco style building in Royapuram, as well as the crumbling 1980s apartment complex of Pasupathy’s home in Pudhupettai, whose curved façade the camera records from afar. In each of these instances, human voices peter out, and on-screen

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a different kind of duration unfolds so as to encourage the contemplation that we associate with a strain of contemporary art cinema whose nomenclatures include slow cinema. Since these moments are folded into the chase of a neo-noir, the fulsome emergence of slow cinema duration falls short, but nevertheless, the film’s rendezvous with settings of ruins, dilapidation, and wastelands resonates with the iconography of Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006) and 24 City (2008). In the impressive scholarship on Jia’s films, from Sheldon Lu to Lucia Ramos Monteiro, ruins emerge as sites of contemplation, post-catastrophic brought on by rapid industrialisation.39 I want to adjust this reading by suggesting a slightly different turn to the periodization of industrialization that Jia evokes in his films that echoes as well in Kumararaja’s: the period of post-revolutionary, postcolonial industrialization. What we see is not the ruins of war, as in Rossellini or Antonioni’s films, but one that has been brought forth in the first long period of large-scale state industrialization and modernization in China or state-subsidized bourgeois capitalism in India. In the age of liberal capitalism, the other name for the digital era, these previous sites of industrial production are in disrepair and their sites of production are now industrial wastelands; children of former workers are now gangsters and drunks. Through this careful cartography of north Madras, Aaranya Kaandam gives purchase to Adrian Martin’s argument for the efficacy of Agamben’s dispositif over the oft-used mise en scène to describe the overlapping of different mappings: state-ordered land surveys of the metropolitan area serve as blueprints for compositions in film.40 From the edge of the city, through routes along the perimeter, a neo-noir emerges even if, when held up against the shiny capitalism of Chennai, it meets its undoing at the box office yet survives in the burrowing across formats. Dust from the rubble and landfills texture this film, giving shape to forms in the dark interiors of Ayya’s bedroom, in the dreary room of drunken brawls at Bawa Lodge, and in the red filters of Ayya’s torture rooms. Dust clings to clothes and sweaty bodies in the fight sequences—literal dust-ups. ‘I love sweat and dirt,’ declares Thiagaraja Kumararaja, unconsciously echoing the aesthetics of a neo-noir whose lighting arrangement benefits greatly from this very dust blowing into shapes. Film shooting sites seem to have differing relationships to dust that are worth recording here. Juan Pablo González notes how in Mexico advertisement shoots were obsessed with generating dust to provide a

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hazy look in the age of analogue.41 In contrast, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai recalls cinematographer Madhu Ambat insisting on dust free lenses for his shoot, strangely in contrast to his style of overexposed images.42 Dust blows across continents, according to Timothy Beach, geographer of dust, and here too the presence of such dust and sweat places this film in close proximity to dust blowing from all of Park Chan-wook’s films and Nicolas Wending Refn’s Only God Forgives (2013)—neo-noirs that share a complicity in their common commitment to nihilism.43 From catching dust and casting it in the mise en scène of films shot in the environs of Chennai wafts in one direction of production. Chennai, I believe (according to Giovanna Fossati) is the destination, and Prasad Labs, the precise address for the preservation of films from the West, a detail buried in footnote 189 of a tome committed to exploring ‘archival life of film in transition.’44 In a later edition of Fossati’s book, Prasad Corporation figures as the standard for digital scanning of 16mm and 35mm films as identified and contracted by western studios. In the original footnote of the 2008 edition is a particularly labour-intensive work of dust removal or ‘dust busting’ that Prasad could deliver at lower costs. That Prasad would emerge as a preferred site for digital restoration of films, such as Warner Bros’ How the West was Won (USA, 1962), cuts close to the bone in that many of the Tamil films produced in that same Chennai cannot receive a similar afterlife, including Aaranya Kaandam and the others mentioned in this book. My own version of dust busting offers a second life amongst these pages.

Other Directions Repertory film programmes offer one kind of arc at stocktaking, from PFA’s ‘Cruel Cinema’ (2011) to IFFR’s ‘House on Fire’ programmed by Olaf Möller (2018), that track contemporary Tamil cinemas on the wings of film festivals. Bala’s film Naan Kadavul (2009) is the only overlap between these two programmes, and the focus for Möller is to sight the emergence of new auteurs and the ‘sense of anguish’ in their films. But violence might tip people’s expectations in the wrong direction: the works of Bala, Vetri Maaran, Ram and Mysskin (to name only Tamil Nadu’s current key auteurs—and there are many more besides) contain nothing gratuitous—their varieties of political thriller, realist drama, noir or comedy are best described as baroque, bordering on surreal—like

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something primeval and ferocious that inspires awe and invites contemplation, self-inspection, self-reflection, and maybe social(ist) realism by way of Kafka, Lovecraft, and Lautréamont. They are abysses gazing back, and sometimes twinkling cheekily.45

Film festival premieres quickly caught onto the turning tide in Tamil cinema, and often acted as an advance audience prior to the film’s release in Tamil Nadu. Just as Cannes placed Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely (2012) on the film festival circuit, that same mechanism has bolstered Kashyap’s directorial ventures (such as Gangs of Wasseypur) and brought his production projects to a global market, the publicity blitz around The Lunchbox (2013) being the most obvious case in point. In contrast, the annual September screenings at TIFF has long favoured Tamil cinema, previously with retrospectives and premieres of Mani Ratnam’s films, relying and responding to his fan base among the Sri Lankan diaspora in Canada. TIFF’s eye continues to be tuned to the sea change in Tamil cinema in the twenty-first century, and M. Manikandan’s Kaaka Muttai (2014) had a welcoming premiere here, setting it on course to turn into a festival favourite globally before hitting the domestic audience a year later. That included a successful theatrical run, cable circulation and support from other filmmakers that was finally sealed with seminars and special issues in film journals.46 Kaaka Muttai had the advantage of securing a global audience through this film festival circuit, while offering a critique of these very circuits of globalization. The film has a pair of brothers from a slum in Chennai hankering for pizza at a global chain that has opened shop in the periphery of their neighbourhood; despite the charming sentimentality that the film uses to cast its spell on us, social critique is delivered in the language of realism, long honed in the independent strains of Tamil cinema that Pillai traces to Balu Mahendra’s films for its initial impulses. In a structure of working akin to cohorts at film school, the current crop of independent filmmakers will invariably refer to working as assistant directors before striking out on their own; Pillai himself belongs to the first generation of assistants fresh out of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and decamping to Madras to collaborate with Balu Mahendra in late 1970s. We discern continuity in a preoccupation with realism contra commercial cinema among what he names ‘the transitional generation’—Bala, Myskkin, Ram, and Vetri Maaran—three of whom also worked as assistants to Balu Mahendra in the final stage of his career.47

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Transition here is a reference to the move towards digital cinema, and in the case of these directors, this is honed not through special effects but as an opportunity to rework tropes of realism during a juncture when the digital itself seems to have distanced itself from indexical signification. Yet, given the wider availability of filmmaking technologies outside the purview of the studio system and single-theatre screenings, realism is refurbished so as to produce smaller humanist narratives that Balu Mahendra both pioneered and struggled to preserve. Mysskin’s entry was circuitous and of the stuff that cinephiles dream of: a film-loving book seller who seized the opportunities afforded by the digital. In his films, as Pillai has identified, the digital will find ways of reinvigorating the uncanny by elevating horror films from the lower rungs of B-films and wedding it to mythological genres that have a long run, not just by devotees but for their special effects beloved by cinephiles.48 Mysskin’s unorthodox entry into filmmaking may have provided the impulse for Karthik Subbaraj and Nalan Kumarasamy’s burst onto the filmmaking scene too, through the venues carved by short film competitions on the TV show Naalaya Iyakunar and garnering a fan following by uploading their short works on YouTube.49 It is no exaggeration to say that the energies of these low-budget works, with unflinchingly gritty stories, has lit the fires of other cinemas, most obviously in Malayalam films set in Ernakulam. With the energy of contagion, and spurred on by Subramaniapuram’s success, in Kerala a slew of crime dramas would stand up against the large budgets of the Trivandrum-based mainstream industry: Lijo Jose Pellisery’s Angamaly Diaries (2017) is the most obvious example.50 More pointedly, the collaborative culture of production, from scripting to final release, that undergirds every smallscale Tamil feature film, finds its spirit in the Ernakulam films directed by Pellisery, Aashiq Abu, and Mahesh Narayanan, among others. On the other side of the Western Ghats and towards the south, the Sinhala film industry also seems to have an independent spirit that radiates out of the production facilities and camaraderie in Chennai. Among the directors recognized at 3rd i film festival, I would like to signal Prasanna Vithange’s works that routinely turns to Chennai for post-production finishes. Likewise, Gaadi (2018) with its story of caste antagonisms set in the British colonial period seems to strike a familiar note to viewers both in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. A different set of grouping emerges when I consider the mise en scène of these films, the location in the parlance of story and shooting: oceans and beaches. Beachside transactions gone

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awry as the British merchants and soldiers lay illegal claims on the Kandy Kingdom, by playing one prince against another. Gaadi uses the forests of the interior to convey another set of antagonisms—trenchant caste hierarchy in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka—following a group of outcastes who decamp to the forests to escape humiliation. When placed alongside Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai’s Kattumaram (2018), we behold the spread of the seas, the Bay of Bengal, as it meets the Indian ocean—impressive in its vastness—and the mise en scène of this film that narrates the story of villagers marooned after the deadly 2011 tsunami that struck the seas from Japan to southern India. In this washed out space, where houses are abandoned and residents dispossessed, different rhythms emerge as this film narrates, in the slow fashion familiar to us from art cinemas, a lesbian relationship blossoming. Tidings carry across oceans, and we can see a similar pacing in the American independent film Waves (2019), which in turn, prompts us to recall Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016) that draws its melos from its setting on the Atlantic. These are films that defy national boundaries, but when grouped together they tend to coalesce in the contemporary mediascape of film festivals, a proximity of interests in the mise en scène of beaches and wide horizons, rendering them closer to each other than to films of their national origins. Tamil cinema, it appears, can come untethered from its linguistic audience. The trajectories of many of the Tamil directors with their impressive debuts remains varied: redoubling efforts on their friends’ projects, doctoring scripts for mainstream directors and working on television scripts. Kumararaja’s hibernation of sorts after his first film ended with Super Deluxe (2019), whose modular structure absorbs the duration accorded to serialization of mini-series on network television and ended his sojourn as a director of a cult film. Super Deluxe’s successful run at festivals and reasonable success at the box office bears evidence to his move to the mainstream, something that has become the way for many of these independent works, with the rise of multiplexes and the arrival of Amazon and Netflix as streaming services, collectively producing globalized cinemas that sweep across local film industries. While crime thrillers and noir cast their dystopian pall over these digital works, other debut works from unlikely places lead us to quieter films, often from outside: Vijay Jaypal’s debut film Revelations (2016), entirely set in Kolkata, was selected to be part of the line-up for Busan Film

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Festival’s special section, ‘A Window on Asian Cinema’ in 2017. Curiously, Kolkata figures as a destination in some of these Tamil works: M. Manikandan’s Kuttrame Thandanai/Crime Itself Is Punishment (2016) closes with a post-credit sequence that has the HIV-infected hero united with his lover in Kolkata. In each of these instances, national film festivals have been bypassed, international funding secured for second films, and a sideways distribution system that has film festivals from Busan to 3rd i South Asian Film Festival guaranteeing viewing that at times precedes revenues from streaming. Despite their life online, there is little that can secure a permanent archive for these films, and they do run the risk of being lost, hard drives collapsing and Digital Cinema Package (DCP) versions too expensive to maintain: all of these are ongoing concerns for cinephiles, scholars, and archivists as we move into the third decade of digital filmmaking. As much as I wish for monetary success and wider audiences for these filmmakers, a recapitulation to the vagaries of global capitalism has its way of levelling film taste as well, and foreclosing options for that genuine independence that many of them enjoyed despite the many frustrations. Tamil cinema, with its strong pull towards realism and little patience for non-narrative experimental works, has been a dominant force; these independent works start off as incursions that the mainstream poaches far too quickly. But experimental works exist and flourish in the crevices that they carve out for themselves, sooner or later finding their audience, and, these days often on online platforms. Uploading short works on online platforms has been an option for many of the unorthodox filmmakers, and so is the burgeoning of film societies alongside film festivals. Away from Chennai, reminiscent of a film culture production chronicled in Pillai’s book Madras Studios , film societies have spurred a DIY filmmaking style; Coimbatore’s Konangal Film Society is one such place that nurtured Arun Karthick’s filmmaking talent.51 His 16mm film Sivapuranam/ The Strange Case of Shiva (2015) was picked up by IFFR, which in turn granted him a Hubert Bals Fund to develop his second feature film Nasir in 2017 and 2018—with an eye towards its premiere in 2020. Karthick’s own practice involves extensive experimentation with formats, including an 8mm film that was uploaded on Facebook. In an expansion of creative energies, Karthick sought collaborations on editing with the late Arghya Basu, based in Kolkata, and fostered informal networks with filmmakers attending the

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Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI). Kolkata was where he struck collaborations with fellow travellers. As is equally the case, digital film culture has helped restore orphaned films, works that dared to exist in an earlier decade, whose verve is palpable after decades of being dormant. One of the questions that seems to have emerged in this chapter—what is Tamil about Tamil cinema—finds a partial resolution at the end, and revives the question I posed on the ontological status of this cinema as a way of responding to the epistemological directions undertaken by the presenters at the Tamil Cinema Conference August 1997.52 When closely attended to, the linguistic force of this identity is obvious and bolstered by a long linguistic self-assertion that served as a harbinger for other subnational movements in India.53 The rich scholarship on Tamil cinema pioneered by Karthigesu Sivathamby, Theodore Baskaran, M.S.S. Pandian, Venkatesh Chakravarthy, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Rajan Kurai Krishnan, Stephen Hughes, Anand Pandian, and Selvaraj Velayutham has been unwavering in its attention to the cultural politics of language as a bedrock of change in each of their lines of study.54

Postscript: Veli/The Open Both scripts and lyrics of songs offer an undiluted window into Tamil language as it remakes itself. In the maximalist language of the feature film, the dominant assemblage of this cinema, I want to close with a reading of a minimalist film that was made in 1995 and was subsequently re-doctored, remixed, and shown at a special screening in Chicago, 2016: Veli directed by Sashikanth Ananthachari. That is half the attribution; sound production credits point to the late Kailasam. This film, shot on 16mm, was an expression of collaboration accorded equally, a welding that hitherto has not been attempted in experimental works in India, the place of the director as the author of the work is steadfastly held onto by gallery curators, art shows, and film programmers (Fig. 5.5). Long paternal histories mark the careers of these filmmakers, and their union in Chennai, in retrospect, seems obvious. Sashikanth Ananthachari’s father, S.K. Ananthachari, was a feature film director in Kannada in the 1960s and 1970s while maintaining his office-space in Madras. Kailasam’s father, K. Balachander, was a successful director in Tamil, with forays into Kannada, Telugu, and Hindi; he worked on an astounding total of about a hundred films, eighty directed by him. Rather than

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Fig. 5.5 Poster for Veli designed by Pradeep Cherian (Courtesy Sashikanth Ananthachari)

replicating a line of succession in the commercial film industry, however independent, a different arrangement of the dispositif shored up this collaboration. Kailasam managed his father’s cable television company, Kavithalayam, after earning a degree in engineering but left both of these careers behind to study with the American experimental filmmaker, Leighton Pierce, at the University of Iowa. Sashikanth’s Ananthachari filmmaking career, in contrast, is precocious: a direct jump from high school to FTII to be trained as a cinematographer. A steadfast collaboration with his classmate Amitabh Chakraborty, an editor, would mark a period of varied experiments in the philosophy of cinema: remaking art cinema and bending the wave of independent documentary into uncharted territories, through a consideration of duration of folk arts, avowedly pursuing the line of film-philosophy in honour of their teacher-filmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak. All of these adventures are expounded upon in Chapter 7. For this collaboration that arrived later, Ananthachari would return to Madras after working for over a decade shooting feature films in Kolkata. The return was not to join the robust feature film industry, nor to adopt the option of the documentary that his

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classmates Soudhamini and Ramani were experimenting with. Rather, an exploration into local Tamil traditions and environmental politics, threw Kailasam and Ananthachari together as part of an environmental movement. They teamed up to make a documentary recording the outcry against the building of a dam over the river Kaveri. But their training and devotion to the language of cinema would change the original brief, for a straightforward recording of the consequences of the proposed dam and the ongoing pollution, towards a direction spurred on by the river Kaveri itself. The river’s rushing waters diverted them, pulling them into its own riverine momentum rather than that of the environmental movement off-site.55 That was the early 1990s, and video was the chosen format for smaller projects such as this one. Kailasam was channelling Leighton Pierce’s series Memories of Water, a video work, whose rhythm was borne out of the flow of the river.56 Ananthachari’s cinematography recalls Ghatak’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam/A River Called Titash (1973) and Tarkovsky’s films in their attempt to wed the movement of river tides with cinematography. Here, cinecriture as handheld movements comes into being from the river banks, a river boat, and the rush downstream of round boats. The film was only half-finished upon their return to Madras, and the sound had to be matched later in post-production. Rather than relying on sync-sounds of rushing waters or even a sound design of waters, after long months of discussion and acute attention to sound as an equal partner to image, the format itself was borne out: video electronic signals bear parity and do not differentiate between both sound and image until the final delivery on either a monitor or projection. According to Ananthachari’s account, the search for the soundtrack steered them towards classical Carnatic as counterpoint and to water sound effects to accentuate the world of the waterfall. Neither option seemed right: both were servicing the image instead of a duet, a jugalbandi, a term from Hindustani music. With the return to the personal and an admission of their deep attachment to Tamil film songs, the filmmakers hit their stride on the soundtrack. In the insertion of Tamil film songs with Kannadasan as the lyricist, we hear sound leaks and sound grabs mixed with sync-sound to produce a ‘worlding’ that exceeds environmental and dam films, drawing the film into the place of ‘pure cinema.’57 We behold rhythm and movement that the two makers achieved playing with video electronic signals. Delivered to resemble film form, it was put away for years, and with Kailasam’s premature passing, a

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cloak enveloped it. In 2016, on the behest of a retrospective at Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF), Ananthachari finessed the work with contemporary digital effects but without losing the static of the original video work that has its full presence in the lightness of touch of his handheld shots across waterfalls. What we also behold is a sustained attention to the ongoing tussle between sound and image, however varied the format, alongside sequencing, that turns out be a mark of what we can still maintain as ‘cinematicity’ in the age of digital.58 In this case, I would like to imagine Tamil cinema as emerging from minimalism—in sound and image—to embrace the flow of Kaveri that starts in Karnataka and gains speed and girth as it heads towards Tamil Nadu, with shout-outs to tributaries touching the border of Kerala. As we know, post-production facilities in Chennai have seen the comings and goings of filmmakers from Andhra, Karnataka, Kerala, as well as overseas from Sri Lanka; actors too have crossover audiences, including the star Rajinikanth, who started in Kannada films. To imagine a cinema that evokes all of these multifarious geographies resonates in Veli’s minimalism. Rivers meander, and the spread of cinemas, this film conveys, is a ceaseless, algorithmic dance between sound and image.

Notes 1. Tamil cinema as a home base recurs throughout my writings—festival and conference reports—as a counterpoint to the dominance of Hindi films and Bollywood in the scholarship of Indian cinema. References to Tamil cinema form a through line in my first book Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genre in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002) with particular emphasis on Mani Ratnam’s cinema in Chapter 4 of that book, ‘Screening the Past in Mani Ratnam’s Nayakan.’ The book concludes with a reading of special effects in Tamil cinema. I returned again to Tamil cinema in my monograph on Mani Ratnam’s film, Bombay (London: BFI Modern Classics, 2005). 2. Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Film Culture in Chennai,’ Film Quarterly 62.1 (Fall 2008): 40–45. 3. Lalitha Gopalan and Anuj Vaidya, ‘Cruel Cinema: New Directions in Tamil Film,’ programme notes, BAM/PFA, 2011. The programme notes for the series and each individual film are available online; the initial paragraphs are included within the body of the text above. Worth considering is this pertinent online comment from director Shaji Karun (Piravi/The Birth, Camera d’Or, Cannes Film Festival, 1989): ‘Watch out for Tamil

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8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

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films. They are easily some of the most original and vibrant in India, perhaps the world.’ https://openthemagazine.com/cinema/watch-outfor-tamil-films/. http://archive.bampfa.berkeley.edu/film/FN18956. Lalitha Gopalan and Anuj Vaidya, ‘Cruel Cinema: New Directions in Tamil Film,’ programme notes, BAM/PFA, 2011. I am grateful to Thiagarajan Kumararaja for pointing out these exchanges between friends. In the archives of life and reading, I want to acknowledge growing up with my father’s quotations on friendship from the vast oeuvre of Tirukkural’s poetry. With equal emphasis in the corridors of learning, Charles Stivale’s reading of friendship in Deleuze’s orbit resonates with paternal evocations. Charles J. Stivale, Gilles Deleuze’s ABCs: The Folds of Friendship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Interview with Thiagarajan Kumararaja, July 2017. Francois Truffaut, ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,’ Cahiers du Cinema in English 1, January 1966, 31–41. For a comprehensive evaluation of digital cinema cultures in Southeast Asia, the first of this kind, see Tilman Baumgartel, ed., Southeast Asian Independent Cinema: Essays, Documents, Interviews (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012). Anand Pandian, ed., Subramaniyapuram: The Tamil Film in English Translation (Chennai: Blaft Publications, 2013). For details on sourcing and nailing down the ambience of 1980s, see Rajan Kurai Krishnan, ‘‘The Locality is the Real Hero of the Film’: A Conversation with M. Sasikumar,’ in Subramaniyapuram: The Tamil Film in English Translation, ed. Anand Pandian (Chennai: Blaft Publications, 2013). Details on sourcing and nailing down the ambience of the 1980s, 243–54. Personal correspondence with Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, June 2016. Resemblances of a culture of crime and hooliganism that besieged Madurai in the 1980s has been noted by K. Hariharan and Swarnavel Eswaran (personal communication, June 2016) and acknowledged by Sasikumar (interview, July 2017). This sketch of hooligans at large, yet cornering a neighborhood, was part of the film’s story and openly acknowledged by Sasikumar as detailing a period of crime and mayhem in the political ranks of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party under M. Karunanidhi, which held Madurai hostage at that time. Conversation with Ravikiran Ayyangari (January 2016) on a discussion on Indian independent practices of Super 16mm and for reminding me of Govind Nihalani’s practice. Thanks also to Nancy Schiessari for sharing her memories of shooting in Super 16mm for the film Partition (1987) in the U.K.

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15. For a thorough reading of the quietly radical style of En Uyir Thozan, see Venkatesh Chakravarthy, ‘En Uyir Thozan,’ in The Cinema of India (24 Frames), ed. Lalitha Gopalan (London: Wallflower Press, 2010), 208–15. 16. Sundar Kali, ‘Narrating Seduction: Vicissitudes of the Sexed Subject in Tamil Nativity Film,’ in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi S. Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 168–89. 17. These references to sequences of movie going are culled from my book Cinema of Interruptions London: BFI Publishing, 2002. 18. On the elaboration of the interval in Indian popular cinema, see my Cinema of Interruptions . 19. Lalitha Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions . 20. Marsha Kinder, ‘Designing a Database Cinema,’ in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, eds. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 346–53; 349. 21. Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1–2. 22. Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). In the recesses of scholarship that acknowledges antecedents, the labyrinth in Ndalianis’ book relies on neo-baroque, a term proposed by Omar Calebrese in Neo-Baroque, which in turn has a generous foreword by Umberto Eco, who expresses surprise at the revival of his early book Open Work and its belated English translation in 1989 (Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, trans. Charles Lambert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Umberto Eco, ‘Foreword,’ in Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, i–xiv.) The English reissue of Eco’s ‘pre-semiotic’ work and the foreword in Calbrese’s correspond on their mutual agreement on the belaboring of redundant differences between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms. Turning to Eco’s Open Work— prescient in its enthusiasm equally for literature, television, and for my own interests an abiding admiration for Antonioni’s films—Ndalianis focuses on the ‘poetics of the serial thought… (which is) open and polyvalent,’ a reiteration along different lines than Eco emphasizes in his foreword in Calabrese’s book (Ndalianis 71). In a broad review of figurations of the labyrinth and maze, Ndalianis places Deleuze’s identification of the labyrinth as a feature of the baroque in his engagement with Liebinz alongside Calberese’s as portals to read inter-textual relays between American genre films and computer video games: Sam Raimi’s series Evil Dead I and II and a video game, Doom (1993–94) (Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993]). 23. Conversation with S.R. Kathir, July 2017.

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24. On a fine reading of the expression of the uncanny in digital arts, see Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, ‘The Digital Uncanny and Ghost Effects,’ Screen 57.1 (2016): 1–20. 25. Personal correspondence with S.R. Kathir, June 2020. 26. For a reading of flashbacks in Parinda, see my ‘Memory and Gangsters in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda,’ in Cinema of Interruptions , 141– 78. The late Saluja won awards for Parinda (1989) and several other works afterwards, her style apparent in assembling non-linear narratives by drawing on computer-generated sound to match image, bridging the gap between art cinema and commercial films. In contrast to the tight camaraderie of Chopra, Saluja, and Binod Pradhan struck at FTII, 1989 would see the release of the self-taught and a third-generation heir to film directors, Aditya Bhattacharya’s Raakh that marks Sreekar Prasad’s own debut arrangement of flashbacks and win awards, subsequently garnering several more with his ascendancy into digital editing. Raja Mohammed’s entry into the profession initiates as an assistant to Sreekar Prasad and gaining his own place with an award for Paruthiveeran. On Saluja’s own writings and a posthumously celebration of her practice, see Invisible: The art of Renu Saluja. GraFTII Book and National Film Archive of India, 2006. In the history of assistantships that characterize Tamil New Wave cinemas, it is no surprise that Sasikumar would meet Raja Mohammed during his days as assistant to Ameer Sultan on Raam (2005). Mohammed’s proficiency would be recognized for his work in Sultan’s Paruthiveeran. 27. For a moving evaluation of editing practices in FTII with particular attention to Renu Saluja and a generation of women editors, see Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Manudamum Mandiyiduthalum (Chennai: Parisal Publications, 2019). Precis in English translated by Pillai: The FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) is most known for its successful cinematographers both in the mainstream and art cinema circuit, as exemplified by icons ranging from K.K. Mahajan, A.K. Bir, Madhu Ambat, Shaji Karun, Ramachandra Babu, S. Ramachandra, Vinod Pradhan, G.S. Bhaskar, and Piyush Shah to Ranjan Palit, R.V. Ramani, Sashikanth Ananathachari, Anil Mehta, Santhosh Sivan, Narayan Kumar, and Mohanan, just to name a few. What is less visible is the ubiquity and the extraordinary achievements of its female editors: from Aruna Raje, Renu Saluja, Apoorwa Yagnik, Reena Mohan, Bina Paul to Shweta Rai Chamling, known for her collaborations with Kamal Swaroop, Antara Lahiri, and Monisha Baldawa, among others. The iconic Renu Saluja, the

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winner of four national awards for her exceptional abilities as an editor, has worked with directors ranging from Govind Nihalani (Ardh Satya, 1983), and his long take driven Party (1984) to Vinod Chopra, including in his suspense thrillers and gangster films like Khamosh (1986) and Parinda (1989). Besides these, she has worked with socially committed Saeed Mirza (Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai, 1980), and Kundan Shah, who is known for his aesthetics of comedy, particularly the “timing” within and between shots, for instance in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (1983), and the slow cinema icon Kaviyoor Sivaprasad (Vembanad, 1990). Renu was one of those rare editors and creative collaborators in the history of cinema who could easily straddle films of varying pace with ease and finesse. (97) 28. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and The New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2007). 29. For a consideration of Madurai as a location in films during the sway towards globalization, see Nitya Vasudevan, ‘Between Ooru, Area, and Pettai: The Terms of the Local in Tamil Cinema of the Twenty-First Century,’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 25.1 (2017): 145–72. 30. Conversation with Sriram Raghavan, January 2013, Mumbai. 31. Personal conversation with Nalan Kumarasamy, July 2016. 32. Baradwaj Rangan, The Hindu, December 3, 2016 (accessed December 2016). 33. Catherine Russell, ‘Archival Cinephilia in The Clock,’ Framework 54.2 (2013): 243–58. 34. Details of such omissions from the original script and continually shifting contractual obligations with the producer were culled from many hours of interviews with Kumararaja. Baradwaj Rangan’s article in The Hindu serves as a public acknowledgement of such antics by producers, who more often than not have practiced a tactic of bait and switch with first time directors. 35. Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 36. Henry Jenkins, ‘Game Design as Narrative Architecture,’ Electronic Book Review.com, 7/10/2004. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/ game-design-as-narrative-architecture/ (accessed April 2017). 37. Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 38. Conversation with Kumararaja, July 2017. 39. Sheldon H. Lu, ‘Gorgeous Three Gorges at Last Sight: Cinematic Remembrance and the Dialectic of Modernization,’ in Chinese Ecocinema:

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40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

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in the Age of Environmental Challenge, eds. Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 39–56. Hongbing Zhang, ‘Ruins and Grassroots: Jia Zhangke’s Discontents in the Age of Globalization,’ in Chinese Ecocinema: in the Age of Environmental Challenge, 129–54. Lucia Ramos Monteiro, ‘Remaking a European, Post-Catastrophic Atmosphere in 2000s China: Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, Iconology and Ruins,’ Cinémas 25.2–3 (2015): 97–117. Adrian Martin, Mise En Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). Personal conversation with filmmaker Juan Pablo González, July 2018. In a coincidence that only dust can accomplish, I found myself at David Campany’s fine curatorial show at Whitechapel after presenting this section on dust at the annual Screen conference, A Handful of Dust: Photography After Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Whitechapel Gallery, 7 June–3 September 2017. For a literary reading of dust, see Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Dust,’ Oxford Literary Review 34.1 (2012): 25–49. Personal conversation with my friend and colleague Professor Timothy Beach, May 2018. Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 278. Olaf Möller, ‘For Example: Tamil Nadu,’ International Film Festival Rotterdam Website, 2017. https://iffr.com/en/for-example-tamil-nadu (accessed January 13, 2020). For a fulsome discussion on the film’s reception and circulation, see Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, ‘Kaaka Muttai/Crow’s Eggs (dir. M. Manikandan),’ in The Child in World Cinema: Children and Youth in Popular Culture, ed. Debbie Olson (London: Lexington Books, 2018), 259–74. Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, ‘Post Millennial Tamil Cinema: Transitional Generation and the Traces of Continuity,’ in Tamil Cinema in the 21st Century: Caste, Gender and Technology, eds. Selvaraj Velayuthan and Vijay Devadas (London: Routledge, Forthcoming), 161–78. Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, ‘Mysskin’s Pisassu (2014): Ghost as the Goddess,’ Studies in South Asian Film and Media 7.1–2: 89–101. For a different reading of how these independent works choose to absorb neo-noir strains available globally, see Vasugi Kailasam, ‘Framing the NeoNoir in Contemporary Tamil Cinema: Masculinity and Modernity in Tamil Nadu,’ South Asian Popular Culture 15.1: 23–39. Ratheesh Radhakrishnan’s work pays keen attention to the mise en scène of Kochi’s seascape, and its location inwards is a characteristic of the

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55. 56.

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crop of these films. Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, ‘Urban/the City: An Experiment Called the ‘Kochi Film’,’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 25.1 (2017): 173–94. Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Madras Studios: Narrative, Genre, and Ideology in Tamil Cinema (New Delhi: Sage, 2015). Lalitha Gopalan ‘Report on Tamil Cinema Conference, August 15–19, 1997,’ Screen 39.2 (1998): 196–200. M.S.S. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007). For a partial list of publications available in English on Tamil cinema scholarship, see: S. Theodore Baskaran, The Message Bearers: The Nationalist Politics and the Entertainment Media in South India, 1880–1945 (Madras: Cre-A, 1981). Karthigesu Sivathamby, The Tamil Film as a Medium of Political Communication (Madras: New Century Book House, 1981). Stephen Putnam Hughes, ‘The ‘Music Boom’ in Tamil South India: Gramophone, Radio and the Making of Mass Culture,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22.4 (2002): 445–73. ———. ‘Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema,’ The Journal of Asian Studies 66.1 (2007): 3–34. ———. ‘What Is Tamil About Tamil Cinema?’ South Asian Popular Culture: South Asian Cinemas 8.3 (2010): 213–29. ———. ‘The Production of the Past: Early Tamil Film History as a Living Archive,’ BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 4.1 (2013): 71–80. Anand Pandian, Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). Selvaraj Velayutham, ed., Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry (London: Routledge, 2008). Refer to Sashikanth Ananthachari’s memorial notes, n.d. Scott MacDonald’s Critical Cinema 5 series provides the gold standard of interviews with contemporary American filmmakers. See Scott Macdonald, ‘J. Leighton Pierce,’ in Critical Cinema 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 255–80. Conversation with Sashikanth Ananthachari, December 2019. For an excellent collection of essays on cinema’s continued relevance, see Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau, eds., Cinematicity in Media History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). In their introduction, Geiger and Littau trace the recurrence of ‘cinematicity’ in discourses that theorists have chosen to pinpoint the residual and persistent expressions of film qua film as it morphs with various forms of media. Attention to intermedial formations and poetics are central to the volume, a consonance of

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interests that echoes in this book as well. Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau, ‘Introduction: Cinematicity and Comparative Media,’ 1–18.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Baskaran, S. Theodore. The Message Bearers: The Nationalist Politics and the Entertainment Media in South India, 1880–1945. Madras: Cre-A, 1981. Baumgartel, Tilman, ed. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema: Essays, Documents, Interviews. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. Bellour, Raymond. The Analysis of Film. Edited by Constance Penley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Bennington, Geoffrey. ‘Dust.’ Oxford Literary Review 34.1 (2012): 25–49. Calabrese, Omar. Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. Translated Charles Lambert. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Cameron, Allan. Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Campany, David. A Handful of Dust: Photography after Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Whitechapel Gallery, 7 June–3 September 2017. Chakravarthy, Venkatesh. ‘En Uyir Thozan.’ In The Cinema of India (24 Frames), edited by Lalitha Gopalan, 208–15. London: Wallflower Press, 2010. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 2007. Eco, Umberto. ‘Forward.’ In Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times by Omar Calabrese, i–xiv. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Fossati, Giovanna. From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Geiger, Jeffrey, and Karin Littau, eds. Cinematicity in Media History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Gopalan, Lalitha. ‘Report on Tamil Cinema Conference, August 15–19, 1997.’ Screen 39.2 (1998): 196–200. ———. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 2002. ———. Bombay. London: BFI Publishing, 2005. ———. ‘Film Culture in Chennai.’ Film Quarterly 62.1 (Fall 2008): 40–45. Gopalan, Lalitha, and Anuj Vaidya. ‘Cruel Cinema: New Directions in Tamil Film.’ Program notes, Berkeley Art Museum, 2011.

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Hughes, Stephen Putnam. ‘The ‘Music Boom’ in Tamil South India: Gramophone, Radio and the Making of Mass Culture.’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22.4 (2002): 445–73. ———. ‘Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema.’ The Journal of Asian Studies 66.1 (2007): 3–34. ———. ‘What Is Tamil About Tamil Cinema?’ South Asian Popular Culture: South Asian Cinemas 8.3 (2010): 213–29. ———. ‘The Production of the Past: Early Tamil Film History as a Living Archive.’ BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 4.1 (2013): 71–80. Jenkins, Henry. ‘Game Design as Narrative Architecture.’ Electronic Book Review, 7/10/2004. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/game-design-as-narrat ive-architecture/ (Accessed April 2017). Kailasam, Vasugi. ‘Framing the Neo-Noir in Contemporary Tamil Cinema: Masculinity and Modernity in Tamil Nadu.’ South Asian Popular Culture 15.1: 23–39. Kali, Sundar. ‘Narrating Seduction: Vicissitudes of the Sexed Subject in Tamil Nativity Film.’ In Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, edited by Ravi S. Vasudevan, 168–189. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kinder, Marsha. ‘Designing a Database Narrative.’ In Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film, edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, 346–53. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Krishnan, Rajan Kurai. ‘‘The Locality Is the Real Hero of the Film’: A Conversation with M. Sasikumar.’ In Subramaniyapuram: The Tamil Film in English Translation, edited by Anand Pandian, 243–54. Chennai: Blaft Publications, 2013. Lu, Sheldon H. ‘Gorgeous Three Gorges at Last Sight: Cinematic Remembrance and the Dialectic of Modernization.’ In Chinese Ecocinema: in the Age of Environmental Challenge, edited by Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, 39–56. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. MacDonald, Scott. A Critical Cinema 5. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Martin, Adrian. Mise En Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Möller, Olaf. ‘For Example: Tamil Nadu.’ International Film Festival Rotterdam website, 2017. https://iffr.com/en/for-example-tamil-nadu (Accessed January 13, 2020). Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Pandian, Anand, ed. Subramaniyapuram: The Tamil Film in English Translation. Chennai: Blaft Publications, 2013.

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———. Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Pandian, M.S.S. Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007. Pillai, Swarnavel Eswaran. ‘Mysskin’s Pisassu (2014): Ghost as the Goddess.’ Studies in South Asian Film and Media 7.1/2: 89–101. ———. Madras Studios: Narrative, Genre, and Ideology in Tamil Cinema. New Delhi: Sage, 2015. ———. ‘Kaaka Muttai/Crow’s Eggs (dir. M. Manikandan).’ In The Child in World Cinema: Children and Youth in Popular Culture, edited by Debbie Olson, 259–74. London: Lexington Books, 2018. ———. Manudamum Mandiyiduthalum. Chennai: Parisal Publications, 2019. ———. ‘Post Millennial Tamil Cinema: Transitional Generation and the Traces of Continuity.’ In Tamil Cinema in the 21st Century: Caste, Gender and Technology, edited by Selvaraj Velayuthan and Vijay Devadas, 161–78. London: Routledge. Radhakrishnan, Ratheesh. ‘Urban/the City: An Experiment Called the ‘Kochi Film.’’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 25.1 (2017): 173–94. Ramos Monteiro, Lúcia. ‘Remaking a European, Post-Catastrophic Atmosphere in 2000s China: Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, Iconology and Ruins.’ Cinémas 25.2–3 (2015): 97–117. Rangan, Baradwaj. The Hindu, December 3, 2016. Ravetto-Biagioli, Kriss. ‘The Digital Uncanny and Ghost Effects.’ Screen 57.1 (2016): 1–20. Russell, Catherine. ‘Archival Cinephilia in The Clock.’ Framework 54.2 (2013): 243–58. Saluja, Invisible: The Art of Renu Saluja. FTII Book and National Film Archive of India, 2006. Sivathamby, Karthigesu. The Tamil Film as a Medium of Political Communication. Madras: New Century Book House, 1981. Stivale, Charles J. Gilles Deleuze’s ABCs: The Folds of Friendship. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Truffaut, Francois. ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.’ Cahiers du Cinema in English 1, January 1966, 31–41. Vasudevan, Nitya. ‘Between Ooru, Area, and Pettai: The Terms of the Local in Tamil Cinema of the Twenty-First Century.’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 25.1 (2017): 145–72. Velayutham, Selvaraj, ed. Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry. London: Routledge, 2008.

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Zhang, Hongbing. ‘Ruins and Grassroots: Jia Zhangke’s Discontents in the Age of Globalization.’ In Chinese Ecocinema: in the Age of Environmental Challenge, edited by Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, 129–54. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009.

Filmography 16 Vayathinile. Directed by Bharathiraja (1977). 24 City. Directed by Jia Zhangke (2008). Aadavari Matalaku Ardhalu Verule. Directed by K. Selvaraghavan (2007). Aakrosh. Directed by Govind Nihalani (1980). Aaranya Kaandam. Directed by Thiagarajan Kumararaja (2010). Adh Satya. Directed by Govind Nihalani (1983). Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai. Directed by Saeed Akhtar Mirza (1980). Angamaly Diaries. Directed by Lijo Jose Pellissery (2017). City of God. Directed by Katia Lund and Fernando Mereilles (2002). Disco Dancer. Directed by Babbar Subhash (1982). En Uyir Thozan. Directed by Bharathiraja (1990). The Evil Dead. Directed by Sam Raimi (1981). Evil Dead II . Directed by Sam Raimi (1987). Gaadi. Directed by Prasanna Vithanage (2018). Gandu. Directed by Qaushig Mukherjee (2010). Gangs of Wasseypur. Directed by Anurag Kashyap (2012). Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang (2003). La Haine. Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz (1995). Hathyar. Directed by J.P. Dutta (1989). House Full. Directed by Parthiban (1999). How the West Was Won. Directed by James R. Webb (1962). Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. Directed by Kundan Shah (1983). Kaakkaa Muttai. Directed by M. Manikandan (2014). Kallukkul Eeram. Directed by P.S. Nivas (1980). Kamatipaadam. Directed by Rajeev Ravi (2016). Kattradhu Thamizh. Directed by Ram (2007). Kattumaran. Directed by Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai (2018). Khamosh. Directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra (1986). Kidaari. Directed by Prasath Murugesan (2016). Kill Bill Vol. 1. Directed by Quentin Tarantino (2003). Kill Bill Vol. 2. Directed by Quentin Tarantino (2004). Kuttrame Thandanai. Directed by M. Manikandan (2016). The Lunchbox. Directed by Ritesh Batwa (2013). Malaiyoor Mambattiyan. Directed by Rajasekhar (1983). Manthopoo Killiye. Directed by M.A. Kaha (1979).

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Marnie. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1964). Mission Kashmir. Directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra (2000). Miss Lovely. Directed by Ashim Ahluwalia (2012). Moondram Pirai. Directed by Balu Mahendra (1982). Moonlight . Directed by Barry Jenkins (2016). Murattu Kaalai. Directed by S.P. Muthuraman (1980). Naan Kadavul. Directed by Bala (2009). Nasir. Directed by Arun Karthick (2020). Ninaivellam Nitya. Directed by C.V. Sridhar (1982). Only God Forgives . Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (2013). Oru Thalai Raagam. Directed by E.M. Ibrahim (1980). Paadum Vaanampadi. Directed by M.P. Jayakumar (1985). Parinda. Directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra (1989). Partition. Directed by Ken McMullen (1987). Party. Directed by Govind Nihalani (1984). Paruthiveeran. Directed by Ameer Sultan (2007). Piravi. Directed by Shaji N Karun (1989). Pisasu. Directed by Mysskin (2014). Pudhupettai. Directed by Selvaraghavan (2006). Raakh. Directed by Aditya Bhattacharya (1989). Raam. Directed by Ameer Sultan (2005). Rangeela. Directed by Ramgopal Varma (1995). Revelations . Directed by Vijay Jayapal (2016). Satya. Directed by Ramgopal Varma (1998). Sigaram. Directed by Annanthu (1991). Sivapuranam. Directed by Arun Karthick (2015). Slumdog Millionaire. Directed by Danny Boyle (2008). Still Life. Directed by Jia Zhangke (2006). Subraniapuram. Directed by M. Sasikumar (2008). Sumaithangi. Directed by C.V. Sridhar (1962). Super Deluxe. Directed by Thiagarajan Kumararaja (2019). Thanikkattu Raja. Directed by V.C. Guhanathan (1982). Thayi Veedu. Directed by R. Thyagaraajan (1983). Thupparivalan. Directed by Mysskin. (2017). Titash Ekti Nadir Naam. Directed by Ritwik Ghatak (1973). Veli. Directed by Sashikanth Ananthachari (1995). Velaiilla Pattadhari. Directed by Velraj (2014). Vellaiilla Pattadhari 2. Directed by Soundarya R Ashwin (2017). Vembanad. Directed by Kaviyoor Sivaprasad (1990). Waves . Directed by Trey Edward Shults (2019). Yaadon Ki Baaraat. Directed by Nasir Hussain (1973). Yaaradi Nee Mohini. Directed by Mithran Jawahar (2008).

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CHAPTER 6

Road Movie

I do not care for cars, and some form of motion sickness almost certainly seizes me when the driving route hits a motorway. Over the years, I find myself increasingly landlocked and trapped, and the war on fossil fuels fortifies my distaste for cars with a certain righteousness. That roadways as a signal measure of modernity has had its own deleterious effect on communities across the globe is well recorded. Yet road movies have me transfixed, and here the offerings in world cinema far outweigh those of American films that, with notable exceptions, have leaned towards simply recording speed and celebrating automobile design.1 Such international films displace the rear projection effects of the studio era and transport us across Iran, South America, Europe, and Asia, pushing the boundaries between realism and illusionism.2 Mobile cameras have moved from the boot of the car to the passenger seat, and the speed of recording the moving panorama now matches permissible speeds on the road, literalizing Deleuze’s movement-image.3 For this signpost to Deleuze’s Cinema 1 as serving relevance for films past the classical period, I refer to Dimitris Eleftheoriotis’ breakthrough book Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement (2010); his book remaps

A version of this chapter was presented at Lahore University of Management Science in conjunction with the Lahore Biennale. I wish to acknowledge the questions raised at that seminar. © The Author(s) 2020 L. Gopalan, Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54096-8_6

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the film archive by drawing attention to expressions of movement in European films that stretch the genre of ‘road movie,’ their narratives traversing across national boundaries. Movement is also reserved for the circulation of non-European films on the continent that cross borders and meet foreign spectators.4 In this attention to movement per se in the extant scholarship in visual studies, Cinematic Journeys revives Lyotard’s essay ‘Acinema’ as a crucial radial, prefiguring the philosopher’s ascendancy with scholars of film-philosophy.5 Lyotard’s recognizes that cinematography—the writing of all kinds of movements—is subjected to cuts, and the elimination of movement when constructing a sequence in narrative filmmaking results inevitably in a kind of immobility.6 On the contrary, Lyotard commends the ‘blissful intensities of movement’ in painting, experimental films, and underground cinema.7 Following on this tensile formulation via Lyotard, Eleftheoriotis’ reading of films identifies the direction of movement towards narrative resolution and at times, their excess as well; his classification of ‘travel films’ serves me well as a model of reading. Keeping with the spirit of shifting the focus away from nationalpopular cinemas, this chapter embarks on a consideration of journeys offered by three films from film cultures distantly located from each other: Bengali-language Kahini (1997), Kannada-language Gaali Beeja (2015), and Malayalam-language Sexy Durga (2017). All three refuse to relent to pyrotechnics and road accidents to punctuate their narrative. Rather, they demand careful attention, a slow reading of their reconfiguration of various intensities of movement. In my walkabout across divergent film cultures, akin to Eleftheoriotis’ European and world cinema catalogue, the presence of roads in the representational economy of these films—in the frame and moving through them—leads me to retain my conceptualization ‘road movie’ as I navigate from one film to another.

Kahini/Fiction (1997) Criss-crossing the country, one film culture to another, in line with art cinema practices of the 1980s that defied linguistic boundaries, Trivandrum-based Sunny Joseph was Malay Bhattacharya’s choice as the cinematographer on Kahini/Fiction (1997). Joseph’s lensing in the atmospheric film Piravi (1989)—directed by Shaji Kuran, a cinematographer in Kerala who had made his breakthrough as a director—was widely acclaimed at festivals both nationally and internationally, including the

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International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Kolkata (1988–89). This was probably the venue of Bhattacharya’s first viewing of Piravi, and according to Joseph, the lure that reeled in his assignment to shoot Kahini. Sheets of rains, cloud-covered skies, swelling rivers, dark passageways of a decrepit family mansion with ageing parents, and a daughter waiting for the return of a son and brother magnify the focus on elements in Piravi. While we are in the grip of a gloom and doom narrative that the weather accentuates—and Joseph shapes further by shooting in natural light, casting shadows in gradations of black and blue, or carving light movements through darkness—the story stirs through tropes of waiting. The elderly father alights a ferry to stand vigil at a bus stand till the very last one arrives to meet his son. Buses arrive and depart on schedule without the son, the father’s appeals to police and bureaucrats are futile, and the sister’s search for her brother in Trivandrum is in vain. Flashbacks to previously joyous moments with the family punctuate sharply the father’s loss and pass too swiftly to offer relief. Despite the film’s assigning the blame for the missing son to the Indian state’s draconian measures adopted during one of its many overt attempts to curtail civil society (the period of Emergency in 1975–77 when the Kerala state police decimated student resistance by aggressively killing many), at the end, we know that the dead brother’s permanent absence is far too traumatic for a resolution within the narrative.8 With his complete absence from the diegesis, the missing son, and brother, structures the expression of anticipation. The end with no closure allows us, the viewers, to experience the unbearable weight of the passage of time and neither routines nor endings can reward us as a stand in for action. For Joseph, Kolkata (then Calcutta) was familiar, having worked previously on four feature films with Buddhadeb Dasgupta whose reputation as a festival film director persists. Additionally, Kolkata was a sentimental destination; it was the city where Subrata Mitra lived, the cinematographer who collaborated with Satyajit Ray—India’s most well-known director globally—and shaped the look of naturalism, an aesthetic that Moinak Biswas persuasively suggests can be placed in a continuum from Jean Renoir to Italian neorealism.9 Mitra’s facility with lighting included dispensing with studio styles of calibrating light bounce, and working with natural sources of light, a material in easy supply in the bright tropical heat of India. Mitra returned Joseph’s adulation by recognizing him: ‘I like your cinematography. It is simple and does not look lit up.’10 Although steeped in art house fare

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honed by Dasgupta in Kolkata, Joseph’s collaboration with other filmmakers included working as an assistant on Krzysztof Zanussi’s films. It is remarkable to think of the globally circulating practices as well as the curriculum of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) that would allow for such contacts across national boundaries before the current sweep of globalization. Immediately prior to working on Kahini, Joseph had won the national award for his short film The Clown and the Dog (1983), the first Indian national award for an experimental film, and soon thereafter, an award for cinematography for Shaji Kuran’s Piravi. To arrive in Kolkata and work on Bhattacharya’s film, Joseph wanted to push the look of this film one step further, and working with an art school trained production designer was a welcome partnership. Bhattacharya’s forays into film direction were his means of breaking away from the art direction of advertisement films: Eveready Batteries and Berger Paints. In sharp contrast to the consumer palette, he was keen on exploring a darker spectrum that Joseph was familiar with. In a practice that only fine arts trained film directors can accomplish, from Ray onwards, a detailed storyboard was diagrammed. Such synchrony of collaboration produced what is now labelled as a ‘road movie’—a bare-bones appellation for an otherwise vigorous experimental narrative. Resolutely departing from industry standards with an aspect ratio of 1:1.33, Kahini premiered at Berlinale Forum, 1997. In that furtive whispering between cinephiles, intimations of its distinctiveness were conveyed to me by experimental filmmaker Shumona Goel and producer-editor of independent films Pinaki Banerjee, as a film that broke ground (Fig. 6.1). Kahini is a study in contrasts. Notwithstanding Sunny Joseph’s speculation, attributing his selection by Malay Bhattacharya to the afterglow of Piravi, the latter’s rationale for seeking this collaboration differs: not sharing the same linguistic universe would steer them decidedly towards the visual. One can only conjure the shoot as one where Malayalam and Bengali directives flew askew, a theory of practice that delivers as one of the many framing fictions for the film, provoking the pun in the film’s title. The orientation to the visual that Bhattacharya imagined through an initial storyboard was followed by a shooting schedule that started with sections of a gang of three on the run in Orissa, and after a gap of a year, resumed shooting in Kashipur, a neighbourhood dotted with warehouses and factories along the Ganges across the river from colonial Calcutta. Produced on a personally financed shoestring budget of twenty-two lakh rupees, Kahini included a twenty-six day shoot, over a stretch of a

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Fig. 6.1 Poster of Kahini (Courtesy Malay Bhattacharya)

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year, followed by three weeks of editing accomplished by Arghyakamal Mitra, and an additional two weeks for post-production sound. The Kolkata screening at Nandan, the West Bengal state-sponsored film and culture centre, lasted a week, a damp squib. Despite the film’s premiere at Berlinale, it undeservedly disappeared from circulation. Kahini’s place in this chapter signals one of the long transitions in art house practices before the shift towards a wholesale embrace of digital technologies (Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.2 Malay Bhattacharya on the set (Production still, courtesy Malay Bhattacharya). Bottom image: On the road (Production still, courtesy Malay Bhattacharya)

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To belabour for heuristic purposes, the line from Piravai to Kahini (the ostensible excuse being that they were shot by the same cinematographer) signals an opening outwards—from a claustrophobic rain cloaked atmosphere, towards a proliferation of locations (where scenes were all too often shot without drawing upon the expensive special effects of rain machines), which would also peg Kahini as a ‘road movie’ by critics, a category that is loose enough to work as a prompt here. Unravelling as a crime story—the kidnapping of a child by three men whose getaway plan involves a car—the story line surfaces slowly competing with the atmospherics of settings. It is all ‘in the air of the locations,’ suggests Bhattacharya whose calculated effect to achieve a narrative of ‘fragments,’ displacing cause and effect, creates a distended shape of action that serves to frustrate recognizable generic structures of anticipation. The relief for the viewer, on the other hand, is a pull inwards and a movement that ricochets outwards in a series of associations and homages that has us in its thrall throughout the long ride towards the possible destination of a digital cinema, whose arrival is anticipated in the proto-modular structuring that undercuts the traditionally linear cause and effect of the genre. As we enter the film’s play with spatial dislocation, we take our cues from one of the three protagonists, the taxicab driver’s rhetorical questioning on their location more than once in the film. At the level crossing, he asks the painter: ‘If this is north, that is west, then is this east?’ Later in the film, in their hideaway at the projectionist’s crumbling mansion in the village, he asks again: ‘if this is north….’ As we lean in along with him to figure out our map, which, to be precise, is circumscribed by the diegesis of the film, apparently the routine question of a taxicab driver is elevated to the status of an existential crisis. We have to resort to the answer provided by the caretaker of the dilapidated house (that belongs to the projectionist): ‘it is difficult to tell where we are at this location’ (Fig. 6.3). To extrapolate further, our relationship to the whereabouts of the narrative—that has us holding on to cues of a world in, and one arising from, the film-world—primarily evoking the play of intermediality confounds us adequately to question settled notions of diegesis. Central to this upset is the film’s soundtrack, to which we become attuned from the very beginning when strains of instrumental music open and easily double as cover, from the first frame announcing the Board of Censors certificate to the end of the opening credit. Without missing a beat, and segueing from a sound bridge of traffic effects, the narrative opens with

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Fig. 6.3 Looking at the map (Production still, courtesy Malay Bhattacharya). Bottom image: Road stop (Production still, courtesy Malay Bhattacharya)

the sound and image of moving trains curving towards the camera and high soaring notes of singing as a background score. Matched to a suited lawyer’s walk across train tracks, and through byways of factories and warehouses—extra-textual revelations of locations as disclosed in my conversations with Bhattacharya—the music fills and orients us to the narrative, assuming the form of an overture. When the lawyer opens the door of a room furnished as a dwelling, he sizes up a space that has a telephone in the foreground, the ringing of which provokes him to purposefully stride over to lift the Bakelite receiver and place it away from the cradle. Next, from his assumed point of view, we

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spot a turntable playing a vinyl record. The lawyer enters the frame to turn off the player, lifts the stylus, rotates the lever, and in so doing, stops the music that we have been hearing. Through this gesture on the screen, we are faced with two fictions: on the one hand, that of matching sound and image, and on the other, the more elaborate fiction of the differences between diegetic and extra-diegetic sound strains considered distinctive in this stereophonic space. Less than five minutes into the film, we have entered the world of Kahini that puts paid to its own title—a figuration of metalepsis that draws attention to the status of sound design in mounting a fictional universe in feature films. Kahini comprises a narrative deliberately strung together as fragments, an approach decidedly affirmed through close reading and openly acknowledged by Bhattacharya himself. Without doubt, echoes of Friedrich Kittler’s formulation—on the question of the shifting referentiality brought about by the advent of technologies of standardization at the end of the nineteenth century, most alluringly through the mediums of gramophone, film, and typewriter—ring true here.11 To update that formulation for the end of the twentieth century, it is worth noting that this 35mm film—with its standard aspect ratio of 1:1.33, a signature of celluloid—bears references to a transition period that, in the new century, will develop into a fully realized digital cinema. One such scene signalling this transition is at the protagonist’s (Rajat) friend Neela’s office, a moment when she is walking away from one desk with a telephone on it, to another with a desktop computer, whose processing surfaces on-screen as a set of blinking lights. As we enter, our impulse at storytelling begins to sequence scenes set apart from each other; one such act of retrieval assumes that Neela, on the phone, is trying to reach Rajat, who is at large, and we know from earlier and later scenes that he has masterminded the kidnapping. But all these plot exercises fall to the wayside when we watch Neela at her office. The production design references an office space of the 1990s, with the now familiar computer desktop, a renewed technology of standardization. In hindsight, more than its place as a referent signalling a period, the vitality of the desktop computer also allows us to experience the shifting ecology of screens, from light projection onto a screen, to light emitting surfaces that are dispersed throughout the film, with varying degrees of emphases. Together, their presence advances a challenge on the supremacy of theatrical projections.

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At another point in the film, the sequencing of scenes through the sound bridge of a telephone conversation that links Rajat, at his home, to Gautam, strolling on the sidewalk, has us reading and arranging details across both the frame and the narrative. When the film cuts to the street scene, we watch in wide screen a man with a walkie talkie at screen right, and with the sound bridge we momentarily match phatic responses to this man, whom we have not met yet, imagining a simultaneity that we understand from conventions of telephone conversations in narrative films: details of introduction irrelevant given the in media res arrival of all the characters. It is when the camera moves leftwards, away from the walkie-talkie carrier, that we retrain our interests in Gautam, whose own walk towards the entrance of a movie hall—showing the Hollywood film The Specialist (1994)—stalls to linger at the sight of a slumped down trumpet player dressed in an army band uniform leaning against a pillar. We summon our memory of this straggler from an earlier moment in the film: he was part of the band accompanying a circus and playing the music of a snappy song ‘Are Dekho…’ from Guru Dutt’s neo-noir film Aar Paar (1954). We meet him again towards the end of the film, in the last segment, when in a tableau framing we see him playing atop a ledge of a ruined building with Rajat in the foreground. This flight into other sections of the film momentarily suspends the sound bridge, which we realize ties the telephone voice at Rajat’s home to a voice-over in the street scene. Our attempts to match sound to image, and then place a human figure back in the correct mise en scène relays the film’s ongoing interest in ambushing us with an array of cues that rehearses the process of forensics. This process of moving through details of a text, and out of it, draws the template for the hyperlinking that is now a commonplace function of search and retrieval algorithms deployed in the digital domain. Christian Marclay’s 24 Hour Clock is one such art work that despite all the disclaimers to the contrary, offers us a blueprint for retrieving from the astounding cinema archives summoned and exclusively cited for clocks and timings. To turn back in time, and to the film, we might heed to the projectionist’s pronouncement to the group of investigators responding to a recent incident at the theatre as Gautam lingers in the periphery of the projection room: ‘viewing films is similar to dreaming.’ For it is the free association of recollections of our reveries, often overtly absurd, that find a semblance of meaning in dreamwork. Such oneiric logic in a film’s narrative has long been associated with modernist and surrealist filmmakers, and Malay Bhattacharya’s film joins

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the canon of films made by Resnais, Antonioni, and Angelopoulos; Camus too is a central influence for Bhattacharya.12 As we try to replace the trumpeter back in the correct location, with his circus troupe wandering in the caverns of warehouses, admittedly we have already entered a game of interactivity that the film has laid out, cues scattered hither and thither with abundant red herrings for the eager reader-viewer. Gautam’s walk into the movie theatre has him pass and pause in the foyer with a wall of single-shooter arcade video games—Space Invaders, Speed Race, and Super Star—whose graphic interface produces scrolling images and buzzing sounds that carry over his walk up to the projection room. Even if target practice and speed are the only corporeal skills we need for these games, their presence in the entrance to the New Empire Movie Theater references the growing intermedial forms of cinematic experience that were afoot in this period. The walk up a flight of stairs, characteristic of the International Style of such 1970s buildings, propels a series of associations beyond this diegesis and into the future: there is a resemblance to the stairs in Escher’s drawings, whose puzzling directions through maze and labyrinth were put to good use, subsequently, in a chase sequence in Park Chan-wook’s Korean film, Oldboy (2003). Returning to Kahini is to return to various games still in play: Rajat’s chess game at the jetty attracts the sudden arrival of a rival board game player, the taxicab driver. The lawyer’s game of shuffling cards, a game of chance and sleight of hand, has the effect of diverting Rajat from browsing through a bundle of records.13 Observational recordings of these games become red herrings in a larger play of sequencing in the film, which has us in its grip; space and time bend and fold to disorient us. Responding to the taxicab driver’s beckoning, Gautam stops painting his movie banner and heads leftwards on the balcony; on the cut, he arrives on the right to meet a woman in the foreground. The arrangement offers a lateral inversion of the previous architectural layout that if one were to try sequencing would offer a diagram of a maze with a connecting passageway or tunnel. Earlier in the film, the lawyer’s entrance to Rajat’s home has us viewing one layout, and his re-entry with Rajat after finding him on the terrace has us in its exact reverse. This room is a source of considerable occult, shuffling of objects and orientation: a television set shows up in the place of a radio; pouring rains outside a window turn out to be pouring on a cup and saucer, this homage to Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) obvious and equally unsettling.

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These games, which video games thrive on and digital cinema years later will embrace, find a template in this intermedial cinema where the shuffling of cards offers one logic of sequencing of events that has the effect on the structure of the crime story, another of delightful frustration for the viewer. The reel of film that presumably set off the commotion at the New Empire Movie Theatre is withheld from our viewing; the dramatic action of sedating the boy is excised; a wrapped corpse in a lake shows up at the wrong time, and its importance emphasized in slow motion; Rajat’s voice, reading from his diary, unravels in an out-oforder listing of the days of the week. Inconclusive evidence in the form of photographs, which neither Neela nor other witnesses on the road can recognize, produces an impasse in the investigation; and the point of the kidnapping, often money, is not even mentioned. At the end of the film, we return to one of the throwaway moments of the opening that mimics the structure of a loop: a uniformed man walking his Rottweiler through the maze of warehouses and homes reappears. Game not over. The mise en abyme effect is complete: investigation of a crime runs into an impasse and its rehearsal is the story of Kahini. Dead ends and road blocks, generic features of road movies, outline here as well. Crowds rush the getaway car in a village, acting both as narrative digressions (to the point of being non-sequiturs frustrating genre structuring) and as ominous signs. Gates at railway crossings halt the runaway vehicle, a 1984 Ambassador, and allow it to become an occasion for existential musings. To hold onto the belated pronouncement of Kahini as road movie acquiesces to the narrative pathways radiating in multiple directions that would find kinship with hypertexts in the digital domain; off the road and into subterranean tunnelling that subtends linear narrative of road movies and branches into search and retrieval functions of a cinephile’s archive, collectively undercutting the hierarchy between urtext and quotation. The case in point is Bhattacharya’s recount of watching, years after Kahini, a retrospective of Antonioni’s films at Nandan and being struck by an uncanny resemblance to a scene in a minor work that he had devised in Kahini—a scene of two cars pulling up at a gas station. One car we are familiar with as the kidnap vehicle, the other a Maruti rife with sexual deception. Bristling with the friction of deceit that barely softens with the attendant’s attempt at a joke, the scene ends as abruptly as it began with the Maruti tearing out of the roadside filling station. Buoyed by the director’s cues, which challenge my own talents at detection of uncanny

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resemblances between films, produced a hopeless search for a film that is yet to exist in Antonioni’s oeuvre. Perhaps Bhattacharya was recalling another road movie, or another director, that in turn, prompts me to launch into another search, draw another map across platforms, and diagram conduits borne out of the same techniques for road designs and road movies. Kahini turns out to be an urtext that sketches the road movie as a narrative of digressions and runs away from linearity. To belabour the pun, if cinephiles deem Kahini a road movie, it is a classification that plays as a secret password that has the viewer submitting to a hitchhiking ride with the risks of being kidnapped.

Gaali Beeja/Wind Seed (2015) Unlike Kahini that was slated as a road movie belatedly only after its release, a more obvious road film proceeds from the practice of another fine arts trained artist, Babu Easwar Prasad. His move into digital filmmaking includes an initial run of shorts before turning to a bare-bones production process for the next project, Gaali Beeja/Wind Seed (2015). This first feature-length work, shot on a Black Magic film camera, entailed twenty-five days of hotel stay and cost thirty lakh rupees allocated for camera rental, crew wages at union rates, and food catering. Towards the end, the final cost of preparing a Digital Cinema package (DCP) for submission to the Board of Censors screening totalled 60,000 rupees. That submission for review was lost on the Board of Censors, who could not classify the film and concluded that it was neither fiction nor documentary. This verdict that had it circulating without the burden of a genre classification exclusively at film festivals: 17th MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, 2015; Bengaluru International Film Festival, 2016; 3rd i, San Francisco South Asian International Film Festival, 2016; and Eighteenth Film Columbia Festival, Chatham, New York, 2017. As a nod to the filmmaker-artist’s own adjacent practice of placing works in the gallery, Gaali Beeja was screened in Düsseldorf at the museum K21, Kunstammlung NRW on June 6, 2018. As a film event, the relocation had just the right sentimental overtones for Prasad: Düsseldorf being Wim Wenders’ place of birth, and the German director’s road movies find an elaborate citation in Prasad’s own work.14 As undeniably inspiring as Wenders is to Prasad’s film, the actual arrival of Wenders’ own road movie, Alice in the Cities (1974), amplifies the trope of chance that Gaali Beeja rides on.15

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The slim plot of the film centres on a road engineer, Prakash. His bailiwick has him driving out of Bangalore and heading down a highway that skirts the city and beyond, presumably the road to Mumbai that winds through what is National Highway (NH) 4 via Hubli (as revealed by Prasad in an interview with Nandini Ramnath).16 Once out of the traffic congestion characteristic of the arteries leading out of the city, Prakash’s drive is recorded both from within the car and from the vantage point of another moving vehicle that shoots the vista of fields and electricity pylons dotting the landscape beyond the four-lane highway, a road design promising smooth travel once past the toll booth. Without any conceivable blockades in sight, Prakash initiates a chat on his Bluetooth device that invites us to hear his voice in the acoustic chamber of the car, a device that quotes Abbas Kiarostami’s 10 (2002), a film constructed as a series of conversations between the driver and different passengers by deploying two small digital cameras installed on the dashboard to accomplish the task of recording the discrete performances.17 Here, in Gaali Beeja, we never meet the person on the other end of the telephone conversation whose presence, as an addressee, persists in the film; the spectral presence of a voice-never-heard updates Michel Chion’s concept of the acousmêtre in this telephone exchange.18 What we see and hear onscreen as a telephone conversation directs us to infer that what lies outside the frame, features of the perceptual regime that the film indicates, are not available on the visual register. This conversation unfolds along points of transmission: Prakash’s Bluetooth ear piece communicates radio frequencies to the car phone that transmits it to nearby cell towers, which in turn relay it to other towers so as to arrive at an intended receiver. As we hear such transmissions while moving, driving in this case, the film displays a series of alternative pathways that include cell towers, whose propinquity to these new highways calibrates the quality of these frequencies. The dispositif of the road movie, this film suggests, is interwined with the touted information highway of digital India. Back on the road, twelve minutes into the film, and on the centrifugal drive, a wave from a hitchhiker breaks the solitary journey and submits the film to generic impulses of a road movie, where all too often such intrusions are the shape of chance.19 Edited as a conversation between two passengers in the front seat, we are drawn into the film’s overt commitment to its own cinephilia. This takes the form of the hitchhiker’s self-presentation: he is a former seller of pirated DVDs whose business soon folded with the availability of downloading movies online.

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He is now on his way to the village of Doddabettahalli for an outdoor screening.20 Before being dropped off on the shoulder of the highway, the hitchhiker shuffles through the large stash of DVDs in his backpack and offers a chosen few to the road engineer as a gift for the ride, and perhaps for the conversation: a curated packet of road movies. From an over-the-shoulder shot, we see titles from world cinema, a distinctive list that reveals Prasad’s strong curatorial exercise, permitting a reading of homages and genealogies: Au Hazard Balthazar (1966), Kings of the Road (1976), Las Acacias (2011), Life Is a Miracle (2004), Alice in the Cities (1974), Seven Invisible Men (2005), Un Chien Andalou (1929), Down by Law (1986), and Night on Earth (1991). This gift of a package of ten DVDs foregoes a dull chronology of dates and expands extant characteristics of the genre so as to consider a fatal car accident in the surrealist Un Chien Andalou (1929), to the wanderings of a girl and her donkey in Bresson’s canonical classic Au Hazard Balthazar (1966), alongside auteurs such as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and other emerging names who narrate travels in a widening Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union and the formation of the European Union. Sleights of hand from card tricks, which we have seen at play in Kahini, persist here as well. At the first night’s stop at a hotel, the engineer Prakash picks up the rubber-band bound stash that contains Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1974) as the front face and Clouzot’s Wages of Fear (1953) slipped under. The second film we know was not in the original shuffle; endless rewinds and pauses on the streaming platform will confirm its initial absence. When released from the bind, there are additional films that the over-the-shoulder shot did not record earlier: David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999) and Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997). The curatorial line-up has shifted right under our nose. After we forwarded a reading on the cinephile-director’s connoisseurship on the initial set of DVDs, the pared down list invites a revision of my earlier verdict: less risqué and more pointed in its partiality for an auteur-based cinema. A different approach to the shifting stash of DVDs receives scrutiny later in the film, from a biker on the road who offers Prakash a ride to a local mechanic. In return, he offers her the stash as his parting gift with the unexpected addition of Nuri Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). She comments on the recurring picture of a silhouetted single tree on the three DVDs that she lays out on the table at a roadside restaurant: Las Acacias , Taste of Cherry, and Ceylan’s film. The scene at a roadside restaurant, designed as a series of shot reverse shots,

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allows for a discussion of the road movie. We hear the biker who wears a go-pro camera on her helmet, exuding enthusiasm for recording ‘endless roads’ that she shares with Prakash. From the road engineer, who detects consonance of video curatorial practices between those of the hitchhiker and the videos that his road engineering projects entail, comes a different tack: ‘[they are for] planning, execution, and as evidence. But these are not cinema.’ We are privy to a widening conception and enjoyment of a road movie as it morphs across formats and medium specificities under the careful and adventurous taste of a curator-artist-filmmaker: amateur videos of the biker, industrial footage of roads shot by the road engineer, and the ever-changing bound collection of films as DVDs. To the delight of the cinephile such as myself, this gift from a hitchhiker, brimming with mise en abyme readings, also raises the alert as to which one of these films will Prasad’s own film quote. At the first night’s stop, the road engineer chooses Wenders’ black and white film Alice in the Cities to play on the hotel room’s DVD player. A game of mimicking unfolds for us as we watch on the television monitor, Wenders’ driver watching a film, broadcasted on his hotel television monitor. A nesting of screens invites us to note the intermedial circulations that carry with it a history of film’s slow and steady migration across platforms: the latenight television broadcasting of films that would usher in a culture of home viewing cultures, as conceptualized by Marsha Kinder as a period beginning in the 1990s. At the far end is our digital video film that records viewing a downloaded film, database cinema, on a DVD format, anticipating on-demand streaming that Gaali Beeja had not yet caught the tailwind of. Viewing screens proliferate later in the film; in another hotel room Prakash starts watching Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry on the DVD drive of his laptop and the film cuts to his posture of immersion engaged with the peculiar bargain Kiarostami’s character is striving to strike suffuses the soundtrack. Through these gestures of shuffling where additional DVD slipcovers appear and several disappear recall the lawyer’s silly card trick that falls flat in Kahini. That trick which also twerks Roger Caillois’ alea and serves as a portal for an anterior idea for a collection of references that this self-reflexive art house narrative draws upon.21 For this sideways digression as an intertextual relay, we are back with the lawyer climbing the curved wrought iron staircase that leads to the terrace where Rajat stands amidst contents of several open suitcases, vinyl records, magazines,

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clothes, and diaries; scattered items that recur with varying degrees of emphases in Bhattacharya’s film. With little prompting, I will go directly to Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’ as the codex for associative thinking and lateral musings and offer Bhattacharya’s film as one way of drawing the art of cinema in a wide network of intermedial connections. Gaali Beeja’s curatorial shuffle, in contrast, leads us beyond our mnemonic capacities of remembering and recalling in an age of digital culture that, as the hitchhiker notes, allows for us to easily download from an archive that is too wide in quality of formats and too deep for any settled definition of a repository. In the endless shuffle between hands, or the algorithms of compressed files, with claims of replicating the feature film, the point is really, which of the DVDs do we finally watch with Prakash? And that choice too operates in the realm of chance, or decidedly as a sentimental choice of the director who had seen Alice at his art school, an extra-textual detail we know post facto from interviews.22 This keen dive into the world of the film, its seductive hermeneutics has me on a spiralling game of rearrangement, fuelled by my own cinephiliac drive that has me wondering why my favourite road movies fail to figure here: Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), Monte Helleman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) and Gleaners and I (2000), Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991), Alejandro González Iñárritu, Amores Perros (2000), Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001), Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber (2010), and of course, Kahini (1997). Pulling into a roadside hotel, Prasad’s protagonist reaches out to select Alice in the Cities (1974) for watching on the hotel’s monitor with an attached DVD player, a carefully orchestrated choice with a mise en abyme effect: Wenders’ protagonist watches a film on a television at a roadside motel while falling asleep. With the camera positioned on Prakash’s torso, from his vantage point we watch Wender’s protagonist, Philip Winter, doze off and then be aroused by a long commercial break that includes advertisements for the United Negro College and homes in Florida’s suburbs. In an action that I shall attribute to many a cinephile, embittered by random insertions of television advertisements that tear into the rhythm of a theatrically released film, Wenders’ protagonist attacks the television and knocks it off the stand!23 At another hotel, another night on the road, Prakash resumes watching Alice in the Cities that seems to have progressed well into the film even if we have not been privy to it. On the second round, he watches the DVD on the internal

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drive of his laptop (an option whose obsolescence we are currently witnessing). While we are attuned to the shape of change through these shifts in formats, we are also subjected implicitly to the modular structure of films when delivered via DVD formats: our capacity to pause, play, and skip over sections. These are, simply put, what Bellour’s detected as ‘passages between images,’ between formats that bear new temporalities and alert us to the vast array of intermedial relays.24 A cinephile’s obsession takes over my access to rewind, fast forward, and pause when watching these films, the scholar’s bailiwick for parsing details often against the intended duration of the film in the age of digital technologies. Resumption of viewing on the laptop, rather than on a hotel’s DVD console, retains hangovers of work for the road engineer. At the rest stop, Prakash enters an ecology of media: a personal call on the cell phone tainted with the phatic of a relationship break-off followed by a focus on the laptop screen that has him scrolling across an abstraction of an architectural blueprint before picking up the DVD of Alice. Without revealing the choice of the delivery device, we return to a later point in Wenders’ film, which now plays on the laptop. What holds my interest is the easy transition from the blueprint to Wenders, both in media res. It was conveyed to me by Prasad himself that the blueprint was a borrowed prop from a friend, a road engineer by profession. Yet, the bird’s eye view of roads orbiting in large circles with points that merge and diverge, rendered here as architectural blueprints, shows an obvious resemblance to the American artist, designer, and visionary Norman Bel Geddes, whose designs and writings on road designs were heralded at the World Fair, realized across the landscape of America as cantilevered monuments and revived by Edward Dimendberg for their intimate connection to the conceptualization of the quintessential American film genre, the road movie.25 A digression is in order with particular reference to Edward Dimendberg’s reading of undercurrents of the road movie genre in film noir, a reading that relies on, among other films, Hartmut Bitomsky’s Reichsautobahn (1986). Recognizable as a fine example of the essay film, Bitomsky’s carefully orchestrated archival footage, advertising smooth drive and high speed alongside scenic panoramas offered by the designers of the autobahn, reveals aspirations towards twentieth-century modernity as underwritten by the National Socialist state. With a reading of a B-genre Hollywood road movie, Plunder Road (1957), Dimendberg

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detects echoes of preoccupation with speed and its attendant punctuation, accidents, in the narrative feature. For a utopian view of roadways that exceeds instrumental aspects of highways, Bel Geddes’s diagrams, installations, and treatises of Futurama and Magical Highways emerge as conceptual breakthroughs in Dimendberg that seem uncannily to resurface in Gaali Beeja.26 Bel Geddes’s two-dimensional renditions of circular roadways, endowed with centripetal and centrifugal energies, circumventing dense neighbourhoods, and decidedly multi-storied, to allow for intersections without criss-crossing lanes, surfaces as a counterfeit diagram on the computer screen in the film and attributed to Prasad’s friend.27 More generously, two-dimensional designs for roadways since Bel Geddes’s concept have been replicated without citation or the delirium of the original, in the land of literalists. Dimendberg’s rich reading of the interlinkages between architecture and cinema draws up close to theorizations of the dispositifs in cinema, notwithstanding his own avowed absence of such theorizations.28 Bangalore, a global city in the circuits of digital technology, emerges as the identifiable location for Prasad’s film as well as the four- to six-lane highway towards Mumbai, and the representational strategies adopted reference a network of roads across India that skirt burgeoning metropolitan areas with cordons held against all but four-wheel vehicles. Entwined with a growing appetite for automobiles, these roads certify speed on asphalt that these cars are tuned up to perform. Gaali Beeja’s travelling shots, smoothened by cameras often located on moving vehicles, points to the reorganization of the dispositif of cinema with the arrival of digital long duration shots and smaller cameras as evidenced in the GoPro on the biker’s helmet. The cinematic effect evident throughout the digital film serves as intimations of the thick overlap between contemporary road designs, drone surveillance footage, car culture, missile assemblage (in the trailer ferrying a fuselage), recreational riding, DVD cultures, and computer algorithms.29 In the vertiginous grip of global digital culture, a particular form of globalization in the age of a liberalized economy, the long first half of the film, up to the fifty-minute point, offers no respite in the form of breakdowns or snarls in traffic as possible punctuations in the narrative; the road seems infinite and we foresee borrowings from the shape of video installation loops that equally service the endless drive that the new highways offer as another form of duration in cinema. Yet, we note that pulling over for the night, or turning rightward at a T-Junction, leads Prakash’s

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car into a different landscape. In addition to intermedial effects that lead us to read the interplay between electronic signals, video static, and algorithms at the way station at night, the swing off the highway opens into a cartography marked by colonial and postcolonial modernity whose reconnaissance we witness through both a dhoti-clad farmer’s walkabout and a bicyclist’s job as a mounter of film posters. Barely uttering a line, the farmer’s unannounced appearance has him striding across fields hoed and partitioned, strolling through rusted ruins of a factory—an icon of earlier modernity composed with his back turned to dust rising from blasted hilltops beyond which lie newly curved highways—climbing a plateaued hilltop to survey the fields laid across a panorama, reposing at an obsolete bus stop, observing surveyors of road engineering projects, standing still in a field as a bulldozer drives circles around him, and wandering in and out of scenes in which the road engineer gathers the kids of this hinterland in his mobile phone photography project. Cast as a stoic, this wanderer is a stock figure who is widely recognizable in the representational regimes of documentary films, parallel cinemas set in villages, ecology films, farmers’ movements, and whose presence here borders on anachronism. Face-offs and stand-offs with expansive expressway road projects, ‘the farmer’ is a remainder of previous cinema’s committment to representations and realisms, as well as acting as our proxy, by witnessing the erasure of state-modernizing projects: school yards and classrooms. The bus stop is now a shelter since the state transportation buses ply on another service road, as we notice in one of his criss-crossings. With an obvious homage to de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and other films that have since paid tribute to the work of unrolling and mounting film posters, the other figure, the bicyclist, allows us to experience variations of camera movement, smooth and gliding on dirt roads and alleyways; even the bump that stalls the cyclist and upturns the pile of posters does not offer an embodied experience in a shock-absorbing digital camera that may have been mounted on it. With an opening into landscapes beyond the expressway, Gaali Beeja, reconsiders the tensions between the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies that Dimendberg had harnessed as apt architectural concepts for reading the road movie. Rather, the changing arrangement of the dispositif here mourns not the ruins of post-war Italy, but the ruins of the modernization characteristic of the long twentieth century that has emerged as Jia Zhangke’s signature in his eco-cinema set against ruins of Maoist state projects—Still Life

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(2006), 24 City (2008), and Ash Is Purest White (2018)—associations that seem familiar in this form of representational cinema as well.30 Antagonisms between state modernization and globalization are as fitting an ending as any when considering the linear unspooling of the film, emphasized in a friendly race-off between the car on the expressway and the bicyclist on a service road that ends with him turning rightward into the hinterland. This closing shot is framed from inside the bus shelter, now in disuse, save for the walls pasted with film posters. Yet, the film offers another pathway that is not an ending but emerges well after the fifty-minute hump in the film, from a shuffle initiated by the road engineer dealing with a different stash of images. With little prompting we find ourselves in an over-the-shoulder shot of two postcards that Prakash shuffles while standing atop a colonial-era bridge with broken parapets. One of the two is recognizable as a panel from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510), a triptych, which receives further attention, as the camera grazes over it, showing us the flattened perspective of that era (including Pahari and Mughal paintings) with fantastic figures defying representational logic: flying fish and birds, plants with tentacles, and more. Accompanied by extra-diegetic music, the homage to Tarkovsky’s Breughel in Solaris (1972) layers painterly touches to the digital compositing. The second card, elusive and beguiling, and untraceable in the online archive led me to ask Prasad of its provenance, which turns out to be the original invitation with a framing of The Anthill and the Anvil (2013), one of the works shown in his solo multimedia show in Bangalore. With its trompe l’oeil effects and flatness, Prasad’s work bears resemblance to Dalí’s paintings. Once aroused by these references, we have entered the film’s own reverie and its secret associative links that hint at the shape of chance that we experience with shuffling, be it playing cards, DVD slip covers, or postcards (Fig. 6.4). Lush and excessive, Bosch finds revival with surrealist painters of the twentieth century, with their proclivity for imagining the fantastic as apposite Quattracento perspective, and not always in opposition. Lest we assume that the digitized archive has brought us radical new ways of reading via retrieval, Adam Lowenstein’s return to the long history of surrealist cinema puts to rest such radical disjunctures.31 (Rather, his reading of Un Chien Andalou alongside Cronenberg’s eXistenz [1999] rehabilitates Roger Caillois’ theorization of games to a central place in theories of surrealism.) In Gaali Beeja, the single panel of Bosch is a game changer that shifts Prakash’s reconnaissance drives to simulations of

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Fig. 6.4 Prakash and collage (Video grab)

photographs off the road that surface suddenly as prints; neither a printer nor access to one is offered as evidence. Beholding the postcard over a large collage of rows and columns of roads, composed with vanishing points, Prakash adopts a couple of strategies. One of these prints is picked and the road carefully cut-out and glued in place within Bosch’s panel, to impose a road where we know to be a flat, wide, and tall wall of green. A road through the Garden of Earthly Delights . The collage effect translates as juxtaposition when the film cuts to the bicyclist riding into a windswept dirt road with leaves quivering.32 The rearrangement of prints set as rows and columns opens other options on the grid: a shot of an ant hill that Prakash had sighted earlier, and that the film carefully composes as a close-up, now occupies a central place. Punctuating up and down the wide shots of road, trompe l’oeil effects emerge that recall the film director, Prasad’s own multimedia work, an obvious reference that recedes out of reckoning when the camera scrolls across the large sized collage with no framing in sight.33 To be precise, each shot has a carefully delimited frame that when laid out as four rows and three columns—that the moving camera defines as infinite—a single composite-framed picture fails to emerge. Rather, an impression of abstraction floods me, broken suddenly by the print of the ant hill. Gestures of such attention to each print simulate the functions of pixels in digital editing, whose proliferation as miniscule points of data gives rise to frames and pictorial representations (artist Rashid Rana’s Red Carpet series [2007] offers a lesson here in changing perspective, both

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up close and afar in his work). A give and take between Bosch’s flatness, digital editing, and collage practices is how Gaali Beeja fashions a short cut across centuries. These nightly excursions into DVD formats watched by Prakash while slumbering in roadside motels stand as the film’s contract with slow reading. Rehearsals of such obsessions and detection of details touch on Laura Mulvey’s prescient remarks in Death:24X a Second in which she pinpoints a return to close readings, either by scholars or artists, in her case Douglas Gordon’s slow reading of Hitchcock’s film. Extraction of segments as insertions into films or distended expressions in video installation endows the original film with a different temporality, one that points to the changing medium formats, for starters. Equally at play, as we have seen in the other films in the book, the online archive’s infinite storage capacity has no end in sight (often at the cost of losing sight of medium specificity) and cinephilia in the digital age has taken the form of bytes and poor images. A fuzzy image on-screen or a decomposed television programme of a film seems sufficient provocation for a memory of a film that although too hazy, the artwork remakes it along the corridors of algorithms. To follow the line of associations is not only to be enthralled by digital retrieval strategies but to consider the long history of the movement of ideas airborne with accents of the elemental as suggested by the title, Gaali Beeja, Wind Seed.

Sexy Durga/S Durga (2017) The title was enough of a provocation to halt the theatrical release of this film in India. From the various reports surrounding the controversy, Naman Ramachandran’s pithy evaluation captures it well: ‘The Central Board of Censors demands audio cuts of profanities to a total of twentyone and the title casting aspersions on the Hindu goddess had to be revised.’34 Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s film had by then a festival premiere at Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) in October 2017 and acclaims were encouragements to accept the directives of the Board. Attentive to such recommendations for dialogue deletions that other films were also subjected to (Aaranya Kaandam, for instance), Sasidharan either excised or muffled verbal epithets; S Durga was the revised title. But for a brief moment, with the protection of a festival sheen indulgent to risqué endeavours, and notwithstanding the underwriting of the state apparatus at IFFI, where the film had its first screening as a work in progress at the NFDC Film Bazaar, Sasidharan’s poster had a mischievous response to the Censor Board: S### Durga!

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After a robust circulation in festivals, including winning the Hivos Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the film in its original incarnation and appellation streams on Netflix, a contract secured through production companies Film Caravan and Aggregator.35 As is the case with the other two road movies considered in this chapter, which were produced on shoestring budgets, here too a modest twenty-two lakh rupees was the expenditure for Sasidharan’s digital film. The difference, however, from both Kahini and Gaali Beeja falls into the ledger of financial allocations. Rather than bemoaning feeling strapped, there was a deliberate commitment to produce small budget films that Sasidharan had adopted as a member of the cinema collective, Kazhcha Chalachitravedi (Kazhcha Film Forum), fired up in Trivandrum in 2001 (Fig. 6.5). On the home page of Kazhcha, their self-presentation as a ninemember collective pledged to good cinema begins with the issuing of three short films uploaded on Youtube: Athisayalokam/Wonder World (2001), Parol (2008), and Frog (2012). A more ambitious undertaking was Sasidharan’s long feature film Oraalppokkam/ Six Feet High (2014) that relied exclusively on crowdfunding calls on the internet and was

Fig. 6.5 Production crew (Courtesy Sanal Kumar Sasidharan)

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subsequently underwritten by producer Shaji Mathews, whose Nivart Films has been a forerunner in its support of such projects. Using online platforms such as Vimeo and Facebook, the film galvanized support while forming imagined communities, before recruiting Netflix to distribute the film. While emerging from the culture of collectives in the era of digital filmmaking, Sasidharan’s second feature film Sexy Durga was funded in the routine manner with support from production houses, and Mathews of Nivart once again stepping in. Nevertheless, a selfimposed constraint of budgetary scale was held onto as the model contra large-scale commercial cinema produced in Trivandrum. Despite having previewed and programmed Sexy Durga for the 3rd i Film Festival, I was still coming in late for Sasidharan and Kazhcha’s earlier endeavours—a belatedness that speaks to the proliferation of digital films online and the intense local experience of collectives. Although it is premature to fix an indelible style on his films, a distinctiveness of mise en scène is in plain sight: roads arrive as an aspect of the dispositif in these films, clearly evident in the run-up to Sexy Durga. In the short film Frog , a motorcycle rider ditches his own bike to ride pillion with a moped rider up the mountain to a notorious suicide point. As it often happens in the subgenre of hitchhiking films, in which risks propel the narrative, here too sinister outcomes await as the ride moves up and around hairpin bends of the mountain; horror genre contracts the road movie with a bludgeoning at the end. Oraalpakkam/Six Feet High updates the narrative of the chivalric journey in a time of ecological disasters: an earthquake, flooding, and landslides in Kedarnath in the Garhwal Himalayas propel a boyfriend to find his estranged girlfriend. Romantic banter in a car ride that precipitates a break-up in Kerala at the beginning of the film lets loose a theme of journeys: travelling by train to Bombay, reconnaissance trips in a jeep across the mountainous range of the Himalayas, and ending on a walkabout. Unravelling through flashbacks, summoning the ghost story that upends the linear trajectory of a narrative of quest, the film closes with a theatre of ritual that has a clutch of hooded figures chanting in a pine forest. Opaque to signification, the sensation of following the camera as it wends its way through a shadowy pine forest, with a voice-over unmatched as it heads towards the gathering, compensates for the excessive indexical meaning of ecological disaster that besieges earlier in the film with digital effects of televisual footage acting as green screen. With the curve towards an ending that resonates with rituals associated with surrealism globally,

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such as in the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Carlos Reygadas, Sasidharan’s film partakes of a flamboyance honed by digital narrative, which sits between illusionism and realism. Even his short film that presents as an exercise in points-of-views shots recalls the language of horror through recordings of abattoirs in Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (1949). Together, these earlier works perform as rehearsals to Sexy Durga. The plot focuses on an eloping couple—Durga and Kabir—whose getaway plans ensnare them in a hitchhiking nightmare. Unlike the sundrenched look of Kahini or the smooth rides on highways of Gaali Beeja, we enter a long night of a harrowing trip in a Maruti van that has the quivering couple vulnerable to the taunts and harassments of two men, and then later in the film, two more making a gang of four. Viewing Sexy Durga entails sitting on the edge of a seat, awaiting one punition after another, the sadomasochistic drive that Carol Clover’s path-breaking book explores for American B-films.36 Notwithstanding the pared down plot summary, we see the edge of the road with the couple on the perimeter of a town after nearly fifteen minutes of an overture that begins at the Muthu Mariamman Temple, with the recording of the preparations of the annual Kavadi Attam/Burden Dance. The camera records in detail the slow crawl from evening to night that has devotees subjecting themselves to body piercing and hanging by hooks as the temple float drives through town. At the temple site, devotees fall into a state of trance to drum beats and chants before proceeding to walk on fire in scenes that recall Jean Rouch’s camera work in his films on possession work, in Niger, most vividly in Les Maîtres Fous (1954). Both Fatimah Rony and Catherine Russell are unanimous in their reading that Rouch’s fascination with these healing practices in Niger sit alongside his abiding interest in surrealism.37 All subsequent work on such recordings, in Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1934), Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon (1985), and Maya Deren’s unrealized film on Haitian voodoo rituals owe their insights to Rouch’s conundrum on recording such engrossing rituals that fail to relay that state of possession to the viewer subsequently; ‘hokey and racist’ were the initial outcries. Of equal weight in terms of influence and linguistic proximity are G. Aravindan’s films that expanded storytelling in alternative cinemas beyond the dominance of realism, Vipin Vijay’s cinema as well. Digital cameras, lighter than their celluloid counterparts, as in Sexy Durga, weave in and out tight spots and drop down to record at length the movement of feet on the ground below; the footage reveals the dance between

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the recording camera and devotees that ensue reverberating sensations of devotional delirium. This engrossing display of Kavadi Attam/Burden dance (a ceremonial offering to the Hindu god, Murugan) appears both at the beginning and briefly towards the end; it invites us to consider the scope (and relevance) of attributing meaning to sequencing, in relation to the drama of the hitchhiking that follows upon this opening at the temple, or its reprisal later. Distinctly held apart at the register of both image and sound, the theatre at the temple, in a reductive manner, serves as a metaphor. Christian Metz’s scheme of the syntagmatique serves well in its attention to the sequencing of segments that seem extra-diegetic in narrative films, yet yield as metaphors to a close reader.38 Without subjecting the opening sequence to pressures of continuity, as we do to the rest of the narrative, we experience in these scenes an excess—an abstraction that cannot be contained by the narrative and allows us to see an approximation of Lyotard’s ‘acinema.’39 The obviousness of the elements of the road movie offers us a point of entrée, a world of genre themes and styles. The fear and paranoia that strikes us in this hitchhiking venture results from our being bereft of the distance calculated and covered in the length of the film. The couple wants to board the train to Chennai at a station. When the van driver and his friend stop to offer the couple a ride, we assume that their destination is within reach. As the film progresses, with digressions and additional friends of the driver crowding the backseats, the station seems out of reach. Trains do pass in the background three times, and belie one of the thugs’ claims that there are no night trains to Chennai. In this story, space distends: the couple can walk to the station or be driven to it on the straight line of the single road that is visible on screen. Reassured neither by propinquity nor distance, our viewing hits a pitch of scale that begs the question of spatial contiguity relating to the theatre of ritual at the temple. Without a rhythm of intercutting, it is a stretch to impose temporal simultaneity between the two scenarios. What we heed to is a call to face the variations of distance that envelopes the film: the journey to the station, the proximity of this road to the temple ritual, and the sheer length of the narrative to its end. A long ending of the film diverges towards visual tropes that call on horror attached occasionally to surrealism. The captors retrieve face-length Halloween masks and force the couple to wear them, while the four men also adorn themselves with other masks. With head lights and top lights shining, the camera records the van riding towards us and into the night to the beat of an amplified

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blaring of Basel’s heavy metal song ‘Chaos.’ Composed for the film, and part of the band’s repertoire, the song closes the film playing over the final credits (Fig. 6.6). Struck by the ending with no distinctive closure, my own terror on viewing this film is barely assuaged by the extra-textual detail that the van used in the film is that of Kazcha’s mobile film society, Kazhcha Vandi. In a community-based activity that recalls the celluloid film society from the 1980s, Odessa, whose members travelled across Kerala with films and 16mm projectors for makeshift screenings and discussions afterwards, Kazhcha’s followed up productions with mobile screenings ventures: digital projections. We have to hope that the only direction that the Kazhcha Vandi can head to is to a film screening, and that is precisely where they are headed to, a roller coaster ride. Endings to all three films point to the limits set by the very roads they are filmed on. Kahini’s abstraction of the road movie through temporal and spatial ellipses distend the cause and effect relationship that shapes its ending. Closing in a scene set inside the maze of buildings, literally off the road, the film recapitulates on stasis. Gaali Beeja closes on a wide

Fig. 6.6 Masked passengers (Courtesy Sanal Kumar Sasidharan)

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shot that has a race-off between Prakash driving on the new highway and the bicyclist racing him on his single-gear bicycle on a frontage road that veers off into neatly lined farm lands. Sexy Durga chooses to end with a bang: the soundtrack blares heavy metal music as the van heads on with passengers in Halloween style masks. All three films open the question of the road as the dispositif that controls the movement of the camera and shapes its recording, and in the meantime, that very road, a design initially of modernization efforts, becomes now an artery for a globalising work force. All three of these films stretch into the road movie, inviting us to see the performances of the dispositive that genre films routinely block. Postscript: We are on the road following digressions, rail crossings, kidnappings, and hitchhikings and, without maps, ride along the trips staged by these narratives. There is however one place—the view from above—that these films eschew and on this matter are strictly road bound. I wander into this absence given the ubiquity of drone shots in contemporary cinema that both Gaali Beeja and Sexy Durga shun. Similar to drones, but on a different platform, we have the Global Positioning System (GPS), a satellite-based radio navigation system, that needs no direction from a road map to trace a receiver; it provides unobstructed lines of sight of targets including ‘off road’ tracking. That GPS is deployed for communication, surveillance, and precision bombing should come as no surprise given its development as a military technology.40 All of these satellites are trained on the earth, our planet. To look upwards, I have to stop, get out of an automobile, step off the asphalt, and cast my gaze heavenward. With prompts from artist Trevor Paglen’s photographs shot through military telescopes, I see a sky blanketed with satellites, with their ostensible goal to deliver internet access across the globe. Of varying size, cube satellites and small satellites, launched by nations and companies, seem to be always on the verge of traffic jams, collisions, and explosions, unleashing space debris. Astronomers have been reeling from light pollution emitted from these satellites, blocking starlight whose brightness keeps us looking up to the skies. To regain that wonder, a different cinema awaits us while travelling on this road.41

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Notes 1. Notable exceptions include: Easy Rider (1969), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), and Thelma and Louise (1991). Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) as well. 2. The most incisive scholarship on road movies is not the obvious American cinema, but on cinemas from elsewhere. I want to acknowledge the following books and anthologies as fellow-travelers: Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (London: Wallflower Press, 2006). Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt, eds., Open Roads, Closed Borders: The Contemporary French-Language Road Movie (Bristol: Intellect, 2013). Nadia Lie, The Latin American (Counter-) Road Movie and Ambivalent Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Verónica Garibotto and Jorgé Perez, eds., The Latin American Road Movie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Sylvie Blum-Reid, Traveling in French Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). For American road movies, see: Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (London: Routledge, 1997). Sharon Willis, ‘Hardware and Hardbodies, What Do Women Want?: A Reading of Thelma and Louise,’ in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Ava Preacher Collins, Jim Collins, and Hilary Radner, 128–36 (New York: Routledge, 1993). 3. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986). 4. Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 5. Lyotard’s writings on film have been assembled with commentary in an excellent anthology, see Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward, eds., Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). 6. For the first English translation, see Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Acinema,’ Wide Angle 2.3 (1978): 52–59. For a revised and updated translation see Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Acinema,’ trans. Paisley N. Livingston in Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film, 33–42.

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7. For these references to Lyotard’s essay see ‘Acinema,’ in Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film, 33–42. 8. John Abraham’s Amma Ariyan/Dear Mother (1986) is unmistakably the urtext that has friends traveling to condole the death of their friend, a student radical killed by the police in the method long preferred by them to escape culpability. 9. Moinak Biswas, ‘Introduction: Critical Returns,’ in Apu and After: Revisiting Ray’s Cinema (London: Seagull Books, 2006), 1–18. 10. Personal communication with Sunny Joseph, October 2018. 11. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthorp-Young and Michael Wutz (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999). 12. Personal communication with Malay Bhattacharya, October 2018. 13. The reference to Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Library of Babel,’ in Ficciones, ed./trans. Anthony Kerrigan et al. (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 79– 88. 14. E-mail correspondence with Prasad, June 2018. 15. In the world of coincidences that emerges in current global art practices, it is not surprising that Raqs Media Collective’s exhibition ‘Everything Else is Ordinary’ was going on at the same time in the museum, but the two events were not linked in any way and were programmed by different curators. 16. Nandini Ramnath, ‘Gaali Beeja Is a Movie About a Road and Road Movies,’ Scroll.in, October 20, 2015 (accessed November 2018). 17. Geoff Andrew, 10 (London: BFI Publishing, 2005). 18. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, ed./trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 19. Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953) is one classic example. 20. For the rhythm of editing a conversation while driving in classical Hollywood, see Raymond Bellour, ‘The Obvious and the Code,’ in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 93–101. 21. For a superb reading of Roger Caillois’s continued relevance, I recommend Adam Lowenstein, Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 22. Interview with Nandini Ramnath, September 2013. 23. For a comprehensive collection of the intertwined interrelationships between film, DVD, and television, see the collection James Bennett and Tom Brown, eds., Film and Television After DVD (New York: Routledge, 2008). 24. Raymond Bellour, Between-the-Images, trans. Allyn Hardyck (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2011).

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25. Edward Dimendberg, ‘The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways, and Modernity,’ October 73 (1995): 90–137. Expanded version in Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 26. For a thrilling ride of a read that includes Bel Geddes alongside utopias and cyberpunk fiction, see Scott Bukatman, ‘There’s Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience,’ October 57 (1991): 55–78. 27. Telephone conversation with Prasad, October 2018. 28. In addition to the rich readings of dispositif, including a slant towards media archaeology in the form of two volumes (Amsterdam University Press). See the discussion in endnote 17, Chapter 1, ‘Opening.’ For a crisp review, see André Parente and Victa de Carvalho, ‘Cinema as Dispositif: Between Cinema and Contemporary Art,’ Cinémas: Revue d’Études Cinématographiques 19.1 (2008): 37–55. 29. I am reminded here of the continuing relevance of Paul Virilio in the age of drone technologies. See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989). 30. I am indebted to Scott MacDonald’s formulation in ‘Towards an EcoCinema,’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11.2 (2004): 107–32. Sean Cubitt’s vast engagement with ecology and contemporary media continues to inform my readings. For a sampling, please refer to Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, eds., Ecocinema Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2013). For a fine collection of environmental issues in Chinese cinema see Sheldon H. Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009). 31. Adam Lowenstein, Dreaming of Cinema. 32. I recall Bertrand Tavernier’s drawing my attention to shaking leaves in The Lumière Brothers’ films. The Lumière Brothers’ First Films (New York: Kino on Video, 1997). 33. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 34. Naman Ramachandran’s first report is no longer available online. Here is a link to his ongoing reports on the fate of the film that is still available online: https://variety.com/2017/film/asia/sexy-durga-releasecertificate-rescinded-by-india-censors-1202625441/. 35. For a full list of film festivals and awards, see the film’s Wikipedia entry under S Durga (accessed June 2020). 36. Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). I have a fulsome engagement with Clover in my

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essay: Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,’ Screen 38.1 (1997): 42–59. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). For an excellent reading of the relationship between figure and ground, see Linda Williams’ reading Un Chien Andalou: Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) revises the idea of diegesis. There is vast literature on surveillance technologies. For a comprehensive introduction, see Julie K. Petersen, Handbook of Surveillance Technologies (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2012). Thanks to Ajit Subramaniam for sharing his perception of oceans and seas.

Bibliography Andrew, Geoff. 10. London: BFI Publishing, 2005. Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Obvious and the Code.’ In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: a Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 93–101. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. ———. Between-the-Images. Translated by Allyn Hardyck. Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2013. Bennett, James, and Tom Brown, eds. Film and Television After DVD. New York: Routledge, 2008. Biswas, Moinak. ‘Introduction: Critical Returns.’ In Apu and After: Re-visiting Ray’s Cinema, edited by Moinak Biswas, 1–18. London: Seagull Books, 2006. Blum-Reid, Sylvie. Traveling in French Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘The Library of Babel.’ In Ficciones, edited and translated by Anthony Kerrigan et al., 79–88. New York: Grove Press, 1962. Bukatman, Scott. ‘There’s Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience.’ October 57 (1991): 55–78. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Translated Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Cohan, Steven, and Ina Rae Hark, eds. The Road Movie Book. London: Routledge, 1997.

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Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Dimendberg, Edward. ‘The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways, and Modernity.’ October 73 (1995): 90–137. ———. Film Noir and Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Garibotto, Verónica, and Jorgé Perez, eds. The Latin American Road Movie. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Gopalan, Lalitha. ‘Avenging Women in Indian Cinema.’ Screen 38.1 (1997): 42–59. Gott, Michael, and Thibaut Schilt, eds. Open Roads, Closed Borders: The Contemporary French-Language Road Movie. Bristol: Intellect, 2013. Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthorp-Young and Michael Wutz. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999. Lie, Nadia. The Latin American (Counter-) Road Movie and Ambivalent Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Lowenstein, Adam. Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, & the Age of Digital Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Lu, Sheldon H., and Jiayan Mi. Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘Acinema.’ Wide Angle 2.3 (1978): 52–59. ———. ‘Acinema.’ Translated by Paisley N. Livingston. In Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film, edited by Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward, 33–42. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. ———. Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film. Edited by Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. MacDonald, Scott. ‘Toward an Eco-Cinema.’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11.2 (2004): 107–32. Mazierska, Ewa, and Laura Rascaroli. Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie. London: Wallflower Press, 2006. Parente, André, and Victa de Carvalho. ‘Cinema as Dispostif: Between Cinema and Contemporary Art.’ Cinémas: Revue d’Études Cinématographique 19.1: 37–55. Petersen, Julie K. Handbook of Surveillance Technologies. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2012. Ramnath, Nandini. ‘Gaali Beeja Is a Movie About a Road and Road Movies.’ Scroll October 20, 2015 (accessed November 2018).

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Ramachandran, Naman. ‘“Sexy Durga” Release Certification Rescinded by Indian Censors.’ Variety November 28, 2017 (Accessed July 2018). Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Rust, Stephen, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, eds. Ecocinema Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2013. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 1989. Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Willis, Sharon. ‘Hardware and Hardbodies, What Do Women Want?: A Reading of Thelma and Louise.’ In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, edited by Ava Preacher Collins, Jim Collins, and Hilary Radner, 128–36. New York: Routledge, 1993. Yacavone, Daniel. Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Filmography 10. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami (2002). 24 City. Directed by Jia Zhangke (2008). Aaranya Kaandam. Directed by Thiagarajan Kumararaja (2010). Aar Paar. Directed by Guru Dutt (1954). Alice in the Cities . Directed by Wim Wenders (1974). Amma Ariyan. Directed by John Abraham (1987). Amores perros . Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (2000). Ash Is Purest White. Directed by Jia Zhangke (2018). Athisayalokam. Directed by Kazcha Chalachithra Veli (2001). Au Hazard Balthazar. Directed by Robert Bresson (1966). Bicycle Thieves . Directed by Vittorio De Sica (1948). Blood of the Beasts . Directed by Georges Franju (1949). The Clown and the Dog . Directed by Sunny Joseph (1983). Down By Law. Directed by Jim Jarmusch (1986). Easy Rider. Directed by Dennis Hopper (1969). eXistenZ . Directed by David Cronenberg (1999). Frog . Directed by Kazcha Chalachithra Veli (2012). Gaali Beeja. Directed by Babu Eshwar Prasad (2015). The Gleaners and I . Directed by Agnes Varda (2000). The Hitch-Hiker. Directed by Ida Lupino (1953). Kahini. Directed by Malay Bhattacharya (1997).

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Kings of the Road. Directed by Wim Wenders (1976). Las Acacias . Directed by Pablo Giorgelli (2011). Les Maîtres Fous . Directed by Jean Rouch (1954). Life Is a Miracle. Directed by Emir Kusturica (2004). The Lumière Brothers’ First Films. Directed by Auguste and Louis Lumiere (Kino on Video, 1997). The Mirror. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1975). Night on Earth. Directed by Jim Jarmusch (1991). Oldboy. Directed by Park Chan-Wook (2003). Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Directed by Nuri Blige Ceylan (2011). Oraalppokkam. Directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan (2014). Parol . Directed by Kazcha Chalachithra Veli (2008). Piravi. Directed by Shaji Kuran (1989). Plunder Road. Directed by Hubert Cornfield (1957). Reichsautobahn. Directed by Hartmut Bitomsky (1986). Rubber. Directed by Quentin Dupieux (2010). Seven Invisible Men. Directed by Sharunas Bartas (2005). Sexy Durga. Directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan (2017). Solaris . Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972). A Song of Ceylon. Directed by Laleen Jayamanne (1985). The Song of Ceylon. Directed by Basil Wright (1934). The Specialist . Directed by Luis Llosa (1994). Still Life. Directed by Jia Zhangke (2006). The Straight Story. Directed by David Lynch (1999). Taste of Cherry. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami (1997). Thelma and Louise. Directed by Ridley Scott (1991). Two-Lane Blacktop. Directed by Monte Hellman (1971). Un Chien Andalou. Directed by Luis Buñuel (1929). Vagabond. Directed by Agnes Varda (1985). The Wages of Fear. Directed by Kenri-Georges Clouzot (1953). Y Tu Mamá También. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón (2001).

CHAPTER 7

Untitled: Amitabh Chakraborty’s Cinema

Amitabh Chakraborty needs no introduction. His reputation as an auteur with a distinct imprint has long been established among cinephiles and filmmakers with their ear attuned to both film festivals and non-official screenings of his work. I find no singular, satisfactory, classificatory category befitting his films, save a consistently enthralling choice of titles, such as Kaal Abhirati/Time Addiction (1989), Bishar Blues (2006), and Cosmic Sex (2012); these three surviving films are held up close in this chapter, and invite us to shake off and adjust the frameworks we use for studying art cinemas. That Henri Langlois’ cinematheque did not include screenings beyond Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) is a dull and persistent reminder of the erratic presence that Indian art cinemas have in European film festivals, and their near complete absence in America.1 This marginalization will persist as long as the tectonic plates governing taste continue to move at their current geological pace; they are excruciatingly slow in gaining the courage to edge away from the US/Euro-centric cinema cultures of the academy. In contrast, in recent times film programming and curating have both been less isolationist and provincial.2

Thanks to Roberto Tejada for a play of free associations that conjured the title of this chapter. © The Author(s) 2020 L. Gopalan, Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54096-8_7

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My own return to Indian art cinemas within the diktats of the American academy has had its share of barriers and detours. An archive of Indian new wave cinemas assembled during a research fellowship in graduate school had no direction, nor support, for a thesis. In hindsight, I was experiencing the limitations of cinema and cultural studies in American universities that prevailed in the late 1980s. ‘Art cinema’ was reserved for European cinemas and ‘Third cinema’ for the political films of ‘the third world’; American cinema bifurcated between studio products and independent films grouped on one side, and on the other side of the divide, avant-garde and experimental works.3 The doxa to date remains firmly in place: formal questions of the medium and its rigour, the dominion of American avant-garde, and the aesthetic superiority of those works beyond reproach.4 In contrast, Hollywood cinema studies have more often than not retreated from questions of form and medium, tacitly admitted in the rise of industry, celebrity, and fan studies, which collectively affirm that the films themselves are illustrations of scripts, acting, and special effects—areas of publication that continue to be supported.5 Scholarship on art cinemas of the world, by contrast, struggles to find a foothold in cinema studies programmes in American universities, but thrive, when admitted, in area studies and language departments. In this impasse, the welcome arrival of the anthology Global Art Cinema rehearses the most pointed case for the geopolitics undergirding the epistemologies of art cinemas, where—with the exception of passing reference to the ‘artsier’ of American directors Todd Haynes and Miranda July—the ‘global’ of the title draws on art cinemas from around the world except America.6 To arrive at Amitabh Chakraborty’s cinema is to acknowledge the extant scholarship on Indian art cinemas, such as the publication of The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema and the tracts on auteurs including Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, and others.7 All of these approaches allow me to move to a more circumscribed place of writing that places Chakraborty’s films at the centre of my engagement with allusions to companionate tracts that have grappled with challenging films. In this manner of encounter, I want to evoke Hamid Naficy’s conceptual term ‘accented cinema,’ Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour’s ‘subtitles’ and Laura U. Marks’s ‘intercultural’ to accept the loss in translation that a viewer encounters with Chakraborty’s work, given his deeply personal filmmaking that often produces opacity and openness in equal measure.8 Equally conveyed in these films are worlds and milieus that make strange

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what initially appears familiar, at the registers of sequencing and dialogue. For instance, we allow ourselves to fall into a particular rhythm of shots, relying on the idea of rhythm, yet soon thereafter find ourselves in the world of local dialects, elusiveness, and riddles. Subjected to the deep scrutiny of a close reading, the films offer a preview of what it takes for an auteur to work on the edge of dominant practices at the risk of his works going underground. To enter into such a close relationship with these works is to admit to their vast ambition, an ambition that a viewer can only approximate, even after several viewings; each reading becomes a temporary placeholder in a longer spell of engagement. In my analysis, I call on consonances with works from other parts of the world, while admitting to the distinctiveness of each of Chakraborty’s films that signifies the hallmark of auteur-based cinema pivoting on a vastly different course with each undertaking. To translate for those accustomed to broad categories when dealing with cultures beyond dominant monotheisms, Chakraborty’s films are embedded in the local Tantric and Sufi practices of the Bengal region, an engagement that is homologous to the concerns of film-philosophy scholarship and echoes several filmmakers’ conviction that films are ‘intelligent beings’ and ‘thought experiments.’9 By venturing into the vast philosophical traditions beyond the Western canon, as suggested modes of viewing and experiencing these films, I lean on several of the vibrant discussions in the online journal FilmPhilosophy whose collective energies are most overtly stated in their first decade commemorative issue of 2016 on the import of being attuned to philosophies beyond the continental and analytical European and American divide. A point of entrée lies in the central casting of world cinema as the archive from which these speculations arise. At the forefront of reframing are David Martin-Jones’ books and his essay in the 2016 FilmPhilosophy issue that are cognisant of the tsunami of world cinemas, occasioned by the advent of digital technologies, which allow the viewer to experience and contend with a range of slow and meditative works.10 For starters, such endeavours throw open worlds beyond nationalpopular cinemas and invariably lead to interrogations of already moribund ideas of enlightenment and progress.11 Such ambidextrous moves testify that film theories in their current incarnation as film-philosophy gain improvement in the vast archives of world cinemas.12 Film-Philosophy itself similarly receives its own de-provincializing in this issue. Drawing on

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Hamid Dubashi’s Can Non-Europeans Think?, Martin-Jones exposes the dominance of Euro-American philosophical perspectives in the academy, whose histories are intertwined with the pillaging of colonies and silencing of postcolonial expressions.13 It is no longer enough to rail against these forms of domination and accept affirmation of their presence, but what is needed is a fulsome admission that the arts emerging from Euro-American centric academia are in varied engagement with such perspectives—call them traditions, cultures, or other nomenclature to appease the anxiety of difference that such encounters entail. ‘Speculative realism,’ the most imaginative of conceptualizations, invites other alliances and affinities. To make good on their declaration, the Film-Philosophy commemorative issue carries two essays on Islamic philosophies by Canan Balan and Laura U. Marks that provide another set of consonances within my reach here.14 At the centre of such navigations, I place Joan Copjec’s writings on Abbas Kiarostami as instances of virtuosity.15 Copjec’s prose carves spaces of reading that demand of the reader a submission to the very challenges of reading the films, partly, by acknowledging the rich scholarship of Islamic mysticism; the keen translation of esoteric knowledge as exoteric for the novice entails the resurrection of the term ‘imaginal’ proposed by Henry Corbin. My claims on affiliations with these meditations aim to alert the reader to the vast libraries of epistemologies with which these films demand we familiarize ourselves, a priori or a posteriori. The questions of geography and location sketch other contours of scholarship that serve as reminders of the poetics of archival labour and close readings of the composite cultures of Bengal.16 This delta of two major rivers, the Ganges and Brahmaputra, which united the two Bengals before their double partitions, resonates with filmmakers, particularly those from FTII: most emphatically in Ritwik Ghatak’s films, writings, and teachings, and his recounting of partition legible beyond autobiography.17 Among all of Ghatak’s various writings on cinema, his call to return to the traditions of India has been embraced by filmmakers in myriad directions: Hindustani classical music; the philosophy of Abhinavagupta; folktales for Mani Kaul; dance, music, and epics for Kumar Shahini; Sangam literature and philosophy for Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai; Carnatic music for Soudhamini; Tamil film songs and the performance arts of Tamil Nadu for Sashikanth Ananthachari; and the return to rural areas as film locations for generations of filmmakers. Amitabh Chakraborty’s cinema too responds to this

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call. As it is for Ghatak, Bengal is a forceful presence for Chakraborty: the geography of Kolkata, the folk performances of Bengal, and the worlds well beyond the city. Tradition is not a static repository for Chakraborty, and the composite cultures of Bengal are more legible in his work than they are in Ghatak’s cinema.18 This call to considerations of synchronicity across world cinemas and philosophies that punctuates Ghatak’s works, resonates of coincidences like no other when we consider the title of Amitabh Chakraborty’s first film: Kaal Abhirati/Time Addiction (1989). This name has the obvious ring of Deleuze’s tract on cinema, particularly the concept of ‘time image.’19 Yet it was neither inspired by, nor derivative of Deleuze; in 1989 Chakraborty’s film was well on its way to birthing before Deleuze’s translations were published in English.20 Such evocations of dating should alert us to conceptualizations that were being wrestled with in the long and rich histories of aesthetics outside the dominions of Euro-American seminars.21 A consideration of all these framings runs the risk of stupefaction, but they equally convey my investment, trance-like, in Chakraborty’s films before and after writing; continuity and impermanence of experience and thoughts coursing through these viewings. With twists and turns marking deep transformations in style and preoccupations, Chakraborty’s filmmaking gravitates towards documentary, fiction, and essay forms. Several films made for television, both cable and for the state-run channel Doordarshan, are lost. Yet more transformations in his practice are discernible as he moves into digital filmmaking. To approach Amitabh Chakraborty’s three surviving films admits to their expressions of secrecy, another term for ‘dark philosophy,’ and my writing itself acknowledges its own contingency.22

Kolkata Film Culture As a chronicler of the grand city of Kolkata, and a writer of small things abounding in the city, filmmaker Nilanjan Bhattacharya’s summoning of this period—the long 1980s—recognizes the then-ruling, left-wing government’s investment in film production and culture, which offered institutional support following the hollowing out of Tollygunge after film star Uttam Kumar’s death in 1980.23 The pall of gloom hanging over film production following Kumar’s death shuttered studios, rendered film workers unemployed, and prodded the socialist government to step

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up to the plate with a mandate to support film production. The establishment of the state-of-the-art Rupayan Lab for film processing was a substantial contribution in 1980, as was the commitment to build the Nandan Film and Culture Centre in Kolkata. Alongside the first generation of art cinema auteurs, Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, and Mrinal Sen, a younger generation helped rejuvenate the scene, pushing Bengali cinemas in different directions. This theatre of cinema sits squarely in the city of Kolkata, which emerges as the living laboratory for cinephiles attached to alternative film practices.24 While a number of insignificant films cashed in on the new subsidies, Bhattacharya honours filmmakers whose stakes beyond the parameters and idioms of social realism, adhering to the prescriptions of the United Left (the communist party), characterizes the ‘second wave.’ The now well-known directors Buddhadeb Dasgupta and Gautam Ghosh were among the ‘young Turks’ of this art house scene, whose films have since deservedly carried the sheen of European film festival recognition. Beyond the festival accolades, it is possible to observe a swirl of directors in Bhattacharya’s orbit that includes Bipalab Roychoudhury—whose experiments with narratives of class antagonisms took the shape of fantasy in Shodh (1981)—and from the far left, Utpalendu Chakraborty with his searing critiques of strikes at a jute mill in Chokh (1982). It is crucial to note that this period also heralds the prodigious filmmaker Aparna Sen, who was to turn decidedly from acting to directing with 36 Chowrighee Lane (1981). Securing funding from Bombay-based actors Shashi and Jennifer Kapoor, and casting the latter as the protagonist in this close character study of an aging Anglo-Indian teacher, Sen’s film stretches the canvas large by setting it in Kolkata, whose photogenic potential was mined by the late cinematographer Ashok Mehta. Although financed by private funds from Bombay, Sen’s award-winning films would continue to emphasize the bourgeois realism of Bengali cinema, a quality that persists most emphatically in the works of the late Rituparno Ghosh.25 While the United Left’s state funding and state subsidies towards processing and distribution emerged as the main sources of funding for filmmaking in West Bengal, the confident auteur-based cinema won national awards that allowed for the circulation of these films in the much pared down Film Finance Corporation (FFC) and later National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) theatres.26 National awards brought their share of honour in the culture of the creative class meritocracy. (The

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return of these awards in 2016, instigated by several of these filmmakers, has brought an end to the nation-state’s project of establishing film schools, film societies, and fostering film culture—a different crisis that weds global capitalism with the right-wing authoritarianism that dominates the public sphere. This rightwards shift runs the risk of rendering a provincial film culture cloistered by state support and central government accolades.) However, nothing could be further from the cosmopolitan tastes of those cineastes who were nurtured by a resurgence of film societies and rewarded with the establishment of a second national film school in Kolkata, the Satyajit Ray Film Institute (SRFTI) in 1995. A few years earlier, in a bilateral arrangement with the Italian government, the West Bengal Government through its Information and Cultural Affairs Department had established a state film school, Roopkala Kendro in 1989.27 With a handy time-machine at one’s disposal, imagine strolling with the college dropout Nilanjan Bhattacharya in the late 1980s, who loiters about the city, starting off at Chitrabani Centre. Headed by the Jesuit priest Gaston Roberge in the environs of Park Street, the Centre was a space to hang out with fellow travellers, including filmmaker-artists such as Ruchir Joshi and Gautam Chattopadhyay as well as the cultural historian of the Bauls (singers and mystics), Dipak Majumdar. On the shelves lining the walls are publications by Seagull Press that generations of cinephiles have since devoured: the published scripts from the New Cinema, the reprints of classical film theory that tilt towards Eisenstein’s writings and Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography, the now defunct journal Splice, and a trove of Chekhov’s works. After a long day of adda (hanging out), news of a film screening at another film society, Cine Central, in a few days’ time would punctuate the drawn-out evening, or perhaps the unmistakable thrill of a package from a European embassy in Delhi. Before dispersing, the hangout session might lead these members of the Bengali literati, boys about town, to a discussion of a column recently published in the ‘little’ magazine, Bengal Chitra Bikun. Well before the screening at Cine Central, news of screenings at Cine Club, fondly addressed as Eisenstein Cine Club, would propel further excitement and plotting.28 As film societies survived on subsidies from the Federation of Film Societies of India (FFSI), these outings by cineastes, reminisced upon by Bhattacharya and one’s conjured self as a time-travelling interloper, are very much part of the circuit that maps film societies across

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India, admirably journeyed by V.K. Cherian in The Film Society Movement (2017).29 Parliamentary success by the left formed additional alliances across national boundaries and bypassed central government whims. The Soviet cultural centres in metropoles, such as Gorky Sadan in Kolkata (the Russian Cultural Centre), was a hub for drawing in artists and underwriting screenings. Max Muller Bhavan (the name adopted for Goethe Institutes in India) was another site that documentary filmmakers often availed themselves. Film scholarships to the Havana Film School were shepherded by filmmaker Mrinal Sen. As of 1986, the month of November was devoted to Cine Central’s International Film Festival, which has expanded to consume the city’s cinephiliac energies with its curatorial commissions and omissions. With all these venues revealing a rich film culture, world cinemas were familiar fare and film shoots not uncommon sights.30 Central to this 1980s film cultural scene, with its left-wing government subsidies and burgeoning film societies, was the arrival of FTII graduate students who had savoured films from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe in their curriculum, underscoring an orbit of international film culture that was linked through geopolitical alliances forged by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Introduction to the first waves of new cinemas from post-war European cinemas was framed through the teaching of master classes to the first generation of film auteurs, whose works aesthetics of art cinema were forwarded; Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahini are the flashpoints of this debate.31 Their differences for a long time, as I recall emerging from conversations with their students and assistants, lay between the philosophy and aesthetics of the moving image, on the one hand, and aesthetics of an epic political cinema, on the other. Lines defined differing persuasions of subsequent generations of filmmakers, both in their process and posture. However, in their studied distance from the social realism of middle cinema, more often than not, the different camps were strongly united; in realpolitik terms the success of middle cinemas was directed at NFDC’s funding for obvious marketable projects, as well as the scriptures of the West Bengal Government Film Commission projects, that were all too often committed to themes of ‘progress,’ and with an end towards funnelling films towards critical acclaim as signified by the distribution of national awards.32 All of these efforts revived an industry, produced auteurs, guaranteed releases, and secured Bengal’s

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non-commercial cinemas’ continuing reputation as a repository of quality cinema.33 Yet, works that dared to push the envelope and strike a personal note suffered oblivion. Independently financed films such as Kaal Abhirati, which did not seek or receive state support, managed to strike only a few prints, and had a minimal screening run at the state-subsidized Nandan Theatre, stand out as obvious outliers. The afterlife of such films is dictated by either state funds or private largesse towards digitization and preservation. Neither a willing submissive to dominant left-wing politics, nor predisposed towards the obvious critical acclaim of ‘quality’ cinemas, Kaal Abhirati emerges as an incursion into prevailing paradigms of the feature film.

Kaal Abhirati/Time Addiction (1989) Defiantly and early on, Amitabh Chakraborty with Kaal Abhirati positioned himself outside the scriptures of Bengali art house cinema that had been firmed up by Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Buddhadeb Dasgupta— and in turn, invited their silence, despite the honor of the national award bestowed upon the film, the Special Jury Prize.34 An even more acute distance was palpable in Chakraborty and Ananthachari’s stance towards their fellow FTII alumni, both Kumar Shahini and Mani Kaul, whose own insistence on auteur style has held sway over subsequent generations of filmmakers in India. ‘To hold one’s distance was the only way to move out on one’s own’ uttered Ananthachari as a way of describing this ‘anxiety of influence.’35 The class of 1985, give or take a couple of years, was setting itself outside the previous pathways of filmmaking and faced a drastically different funding situation: NFDC had effectively closed down and funding that was previously available for auteur-driven projects was no longer possible. Additionally, a desire, according to Ananthachari, ‘to think outside the box,’ led them in different directions, a search for a point outside the set principles of Bombay cinema and often outside film production itself: Mrinal Pande, for instance, headed off to teach Marathi at the American School. Even before the final seal of graduation in 1985, advertisement companies in Bombay had recruited Amitabh Chakraborty for his film editing skills in the era before the arrival of the digital; Sumantra Ghosla’s outfit was one such company. Two months into lining up and splicing images

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together celebrating consumer culture, an offer from a former classmate, Kaushik Gupta (who had landed with funds from Pupul Jayakar for a documentary on the Negrito tribes in the Andaman Islands), had Chakraborty chuck this advertising job and join the three-person team that headed on a two-month shooting trip. The trio consisted of Kaushik Gupta as director, Sashikanth Ananthachari on the camera, and Chakraborty doubling as both editor and assistant director. That intrepid trip delivered the documentary film, Under the Green Canopy (1987–88), wrapped up Chakraborty’s stint with Bombay advertising firms for good, and led him to decamp to Kolkata. This swerve towards documentary filmmaking opened portals into additional forms of support, including Doordarshan, which commissioned Chakraborty to make a series of films on Bengali folk performances such as Jatra and Pattachitra. Ananthachari’s own distance from commercial Tamil cinema, also effecting a studied distance from his father’s mainstream film production, stationed him in Kolkata in the same period and had him collaborating with Chakraborty on these projects as well. A regular set of exchanges between former classmates Soudhamini and Ramani in Chennai and those in Kolkata was fortified by the infrastructure of production technologies before the advent of digital: film processing was at Prasad Labs in Chennai to which Chakraborty headed off to undertake editing soon thereafter.36 Amitabh Chakraborty’s arrival in Kolkata after graduating from FTII speaks of a retourné, which reverberates across a generation of children whose parents, deracinated, inhabited a cartography of employment that spanned the entire nation-state. Not strictly part of the Bengali diaspora, Chakraborty’s return to Kolkata would not have been an obvious move, but would have been familiar to such dispersed employees as a return to one’s hometown.37 Yet to have decamped to this city so young in 1987, rather than attempting first to eke out a career in Mumbai (the centre of commercial cinema production), does not simply declare an affiliation of kinship and linguistic attachment to Kolkata, but also asserts a grounding—a philosophy of aesthetics that characterizes many of his generation. Such an arrival allowed for immersion into other temporalities beyond the progressive modern—a direction carved by Ritwik Ghatak, whose stint as principal at FTII influenced the first new wave. Ghatak’s films and writings continue to emerge as north stars for thinking of alternatives to storytelling without forsaking the available traditional arts. The

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scope and breadth of the traditional yielded a wide range of interpretations, including the filmworks of the class of 1985, which had access only to his films and stories of his lectures from a practice of oral traditions at FTII. Kaal Abhirati was borne out of many such back-and-forth exchanges with classmates and filmmakers, both dead and alive, in world cinema. Ananthachari’s narrative of bestowing wonders on the hand-cranked Bolex camera that Soudhamini and Ramani had experimented with had both Amitabh Chakraborty and Ananthachari take on the challenge, and the cost of production was down to a quarter of the total budget. With a budget of four lakh rupees that Chakraborty’s parents had bequeathed towards a flat and which was now being funnelled into Kaal Abhirati, most of the primary crew worked for gratis as was the ethic of several small- to low-budget films. There was a consensus that 16mm stock would do fine with cameras borrowed from outfits in Kolkata and a blow up to 35mm would not be a compromise if they paid careful attention to processing.38 The synergy of collective effort would surface later in interviews and film reviews (Fig. 7.1). Upon release, its aloofness and distance from extant art house practices had some immediate consequences. On the home front, the film faced stony silence from Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, the elder luminaries of independent art and political cinema; Ray’s aversion to FTII filmmakers— Kumar Shahini and Mani Kaul—was legendary.39 One of the outcomes of the tepid response in the Kolkata film circles touched a nerve with a collaborator who requested his name be removed from the title card. But outside the confines of Kolkata, at a spate of screenings in Kerala under the auspices of the Odessa Film Society, Chakraborty would receive his due more than once; at a late-night screening in the rice paddy fields, available in the dry season after harvest, one of the viewers would tell him: ‘You have changed the aesthetics of art cinema,’ an overt recognition of the film’s originality. In an entirely different direction, Chakraborty would be pulled aside by S.K. Ananthachari, a Kannada popular cinema director and father of cinematographer Sashikanth Ananthachari, to be asked: ‘Who is your audience for this film?’ Both of these remarks would be imparted to me by Chakraborty, nearly two decades later, to express his own contradictory reviews of his first film: the keen detection of its individuality and the risks of alienation that befalls such endeavours.

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Fig. 7.1 Sashikanth Ananthachari shooting Kaal Abhirati (Courtesy Sashikanth Ananthachari)

Yet, Kaal Abhirati was not so easily written off in the first run of screenings—its singularity was apparent to other viewers in other locations. A still from the film graced the cover of Deep Focus in 1990, soon after its release. As one of the early magazines committed to serious writing about cinema since the late 1980s—Cinemaya and Splice were the others—Deep Focus ran a review by Dhruba Gupta followed by Rana Mitra’s interview with Amitabh Chakraborty.40 Gupta’s endorsement of the film’s singular attempt to burst open the language of art cinema relays details of programme notes accompanying the screenings that take on the film’s iconoclasm, which stretches from including particular forms of Kali idols to flattening the archetypes of the Bengali feudal mise en scène, the forlorn widow one such figure. Gupta opens by recognizing the film’s collaborative efforts among friends from FTII and closes bemoaning the film’s absence from the list of screenings at the annual IFFI’s Indian Panorama section. The emphasis on friends as the ideal audience is equally

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apparent in filmmaker Soudhamini’s writing; hers was one of the first responses to the film, in the programme notes that accompanied the screening at Screen Unit (the Mumbai-based film society curated by Amrit Gangar) showing it alongside Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva México! (1930/1979); this was a stop on the traveling screenings circuit that marked the film’s reception in late 1989 through 1990.41 Chakraborty’s interview with Rana Mitra offers insights into the world of film reception and filmmaking that he encountered with Kaal Abhirati. He cites collaborative work with fellow filmmakers, describes coming up with the idea of the film while editing Soudhamini’s Thalarndhadhu/It Rested (1988), and notes the frustration with the closed world of, what was then, the ‘other cinema’ that was set up in contrast to commercial fare. He recounts with resignation that the framing of this alternative cinema from construction to reception is far too entrenched and that the ‘ice may not even melt.’ Ominous as it now sounds in the period of polar ice melts, Kaal Abhirati would have many more lives in other formats, perhaps belatedly, and alarmingly with the onset of the climate crisis.42 To watch Amitabh Chakraborty’s first feature film again, decades later, is to be subjected to the vagaries of medium and platforms. And to have watched a 35mm screening of that same film is also to marvel at one’s luck for having seized a rare opportunity at either a repertory screening, an FTII student screening at the Main Theatre, or at the Experimental Cinemas of India/Films Division screening in Mumbai, June 2013. The aura surrounding the film is most palpable at screenings at FTII, tormented by its glaring absence in the catalogue of the National Film Archive (NFAI); this is stationed but a stone’s throw away, further down Law College Road, and is the repository for scheduled screenings on the curriculum.43 The whereabouts of the 35mm print reveal the culture of cataloguing adopted by NFAI: if a film wins the state’s national award, filmmakers are obliged to deposit a print there. In the case of Kaal Abhirati, there was a story of missed chances that deserves recapping. As a film submitted for consideration for India’s National Awards, it had its detractors among the jury (Mrinal Sen did not care for it), but was rescued for reconsideration by Kundan Shah who campaigned for his fellow jury members to watch it again. That may have been the reason for the film’s Special Jury Prize. Such recognition, a particular one beyond the roster of awards, precludes the film from the obligation of submission to the archive. At one point, the film was selected to be a part of a film package that travelled with the Festival of

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India programme in the 1990s, which resulted in a 35mm copy landing in the dominion of The Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF). It is this copy that enjoyed circulation at repertory screenings across England and Spain between 2007 and 2009. It is this copy that FTII borrows for its screenings, a courtesy arrangement between DFF and NFAI. By contrast, there was something of an advantage to having a Kolkata based filmmaker for SRFTII, which has in its archive another deteriorating copy of the film. Still at large is a 16mm copy of the film that Chakraborty travelled with for several tent cinema screenings in Kerala, up and down the narrow state with the Odessa Film Society. This print was a fitting gift between fellow travellers: Chalam Bennurkar had struck the print to return the favour of Chakraborty having edited his Kutti Japan/ Children of Mini-Japan (1990). A Doordarshan screening would have the film enter the world of contraband in the 1990s: screen copies of the film—leaving intact the SMPTE colour bar image—would pass from one fan to another. At a later moment, the cinematographer Sashikanth Ananthachari supervised the transfer to a U-matic copy at considerable cost. The expense of this transfer competed with the vexed nature of the process: he had to locate and retrieve a copy from the bureaucratic maze of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, where filmmakers, no less than scholars, must submit to the dominance of apparatchiks. This one U-matic tape that Ananthachari held onto was lent to Chakraborty as part of his portfolio for an application to the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) for postproduction funds, a non-governmental unit that has since 1993 been the singular source of funding for documentary films in India. At the other extreme to the culture of obdurate bureaucrats at the National Archives, IFA’s slash-and-burn attitude towards the process of archiving applications resulted in this one copy of a supervised transfer of the film being tossed out permanently. A third copy, a Beta tape procured from a Kolkata film distributor, was sticky from neglect and deterioration and rescued from total disrepair; Putul Mahmood supervised a less-than-clean version at a video conversion shop in Gariahat in Kolkata. After over a decade-long oblivion, Kaal Abhirati would have its grandeur restored as a projected film as part of the line-up for the Wisdom Tree Festival in 2002. Putul Mahmood recalls this second viewing of the film on campus as having a ‘haunting, dream like rhythm…some kind of taal.’44 Other encomiums would soon follow, including Experimenta India’s touring series on artists’ film and video works in India

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(2004–06), and a subsequent launching at the Tate Modern (2006) under the curatorial banner: ‘Cinema of Prayoga: Indian Experimental Film & Video 1913–2006.’45 A published catalogue traces Experimenta’s founder, curator Shai Heredia, whose pioneering efforts to archive, programme, and support experimental works emerging from India and the diaspora has revived moribund discussions on the differences between art and mainstream cinema practices in the age of gallery films.46 In addition to highlighting contemporary artists’ films and video art, ‘Cinema of Prayoga’ owes its nomenclature to Amrit Ganger, a Mumbai-based writer, curator, and historian, whose commitment to alternative cinemas is on record for leading the Screen Unit Film Society and publishing writings on filmmakers. It was his Screen Unit that had programmed Kaal Abhirati alongside Eisenstein, with programme notes by Soudhamini, in that initial circulation in 1990 previously mentioned. ‘Seventeen years later,’ Gangar’s reminiscing has Chakraborty in the middle of finishing a DV film, Bishar Blues , and feeling distant from the ‘minimal…rigor’ of his first film.47 Kaal Abhirati’s standing in this new curatorial programming draws it out of its near oblivion and into the company of other works that bolster the independent inroads struck by this film, outside the scriptures of both state-financed projects and the first new wave films; its title beguiling in the age of digital where notions of acceleration contend with practices of slow viewing of moving image, an indication that Chakraborty’s film seems to have arrived just on time. Despite the renewed fascination of curators and cinephiles towards the film, my attempt to watch it again up close, for that proverbial slow scholarship, was to be met with the disappointment of discovering the copy was missing at the NFAI. As luck would have it, I was gifted a DVD copy, which turns out to be a copy of a VHS of the film, broadcasted on Doordarshan, date untraceable. That was the copy that would find its way back to Chakraborty, which was then handed to me. If its scant presence in the 35mm format is heartrending enough to a cinephile, an attachment to the video copy of a television transmission of Kaal Abhirati amplifies a longing for times lost, the time of celluloid, now frozen as flickers of light betraying the deteriorating film at the moment of transmission. Despite the compromised quality of the televisual broadcasted film, further exacerbated by the shock of the missing celluloid print—none of these diminish my impression of the film’s uncompromising rigour. Chakraborty’s approach bears a resemblance to the canonized works of what András Bálint Kovács identifies as ‘second modernism’ in post-war

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European cinema that swept into place with the absorption of sound technology and expressed a certain degree of self-reflexivity of cinema itself as a medium.48 In the context of Indian cinemas, Kaal Abhirati’s comeback and canonisation are guarantees of the swelling of the ‘second new wave,’ a term coined by Nilanjan Bhattacharya for the filmmaking period of the late 1980s onwards.49 Sketching the filmmaker’s biographical details, attending to economies of funding, and signalling circuits of awards in the shadow of the first new wave supply the idea of a context that radiates outwards, yet runs the risk of moving away from the film per se. Translating the dynamics of the robust Kolkata film culture scene is at best a fiction and barely assures intimacy with the text. Chakraborty’s avowed distance from his own first film, which he expressed to Amrit Gangar and myself, baits me to do just the opposite—to listen to my own initial lure to the work. As degraded an image as VHS conveys, in its recording of 35mm broadcasted on television, the aura of being in the grasp of an ‘nth’ generation copy barely diminishes the film’s quixotic presumption that the viewer’s disposition is one which engages vigorously with the language of art cinemas that run the gamut of political avant-garde to impenetrable modernist texts. For that alert viewer, such as myself, who cannot bear to look away, a shakedown is in the offing. Forsaking plot lines, Kaal Abhirati unravels as a walkabout. The protagonist wandering through Kolkata with a woman is one plot line that weaves into others, including long scenes of slumber. To stretch into the film in this low-tech contraband form is to be literal about the summons in the opening shot—the outstretched arm—and to embody it: to lie down and put the laptop at close reach. All other positions, even seated, will have us look too far afield. Chakraborty himself reaffirms the activity of deep focus, in response to Gangar’s recollection: ‘You also said, ‘For me, the first shot is the film.’ How?’50 In this eightminute long take, the auteur’s description on the experience of time is about the young boys in the background emptying buckets of water, riding a buffalo, and after more buckets are brought out, the scene ends with a ride on a bicycle across the frame, right to left. Such attentiveness to these routines contrasts the outstretched arm that lies still in the foreground. From our private viewing on a small screen, we simulate ‘the tatami shot’ position from Ozu; here in Kaal Abhirati, the shine of the well-worn red oxide floor, the arm of a recumbent figure, off-screen, is ours to inhabit. It is from the position of the prone figure, off-screen, that we notice the activities of the boys in the far-ground and experience the

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duration of viewing. While the boys offer a clockwork measurement of tasks finished, the arm, and by extension our body on the floor watching the screen, draws it closer to one of the iterations in the iconography of lying down with no end in sight: the sleeping figure51 (Figs. 7.2 and 7.3). To evoke the sleeping figure, inserting our duration of reading into the frame—although inconclusive and elusive from the point of view of authorial intentions (for instance, had Chakraborty known of the painting of the sleeping figure?)—runs the risk of us arriving with our references as well. I want to stay with the invitation to enter the frame. The image of a prone figure, asleep or not, leads me to Genevieve Warwick’s alluring reading of Caravaggio’s painting Sleeping Cupid (1603) as a ‘contrapuntal relationship (…) with art-historical memory.’52 Towards the end of this essay that keenly navigates the dominant appraisal held by G.P. Bellori since 1672, the bluntness of Caravaggio’s radical engagement takes over and is worth reiterating53 :

Fig. 7.2 The bed in Kaal Abhirati (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty)

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Fig. 7.3 Waking up (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty)

The body of the classical sculptural Cupid, by contrast, was made to solicit the effect of tenderness through a rendering of stone in terms of an idealized smoothness. The skin of Caravaggio’s Cupid is instead semiotically unstable, its references to the world of the painter and his models in seeming conflict with the established idealizing visual conventions of the subject matter, so challenging its own pictorial act of recollection. (…) It pictures the darkened materiality of ‘the streets,’ like the deeper realms of the psyche, manifest in archaic myth and the dreams and desires of troubled sleep. If the classical mortuary figure of the sleeping Cupid was at once a memorial of life’s tenderness and a marker of its passing, Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid is a fractured or ruptured memory, a shifting and unstable dreamlike recollection of the past within the present.

Apposite in its preoccupations of troubled sleep, I am poised to watch the film close down to the floor, the customary alertness of being seated in a theatre acquiesces to lying down. Mimicking, or better still, performing the posture of a sleeping figure rearranges the experience of this film

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from the pristine theatrical projection to the degraded copy of a VHS, scoring an advantage in intimacy as embodied experience. In this format, however degraded and corrupted, the outstretched arm arrives as an invitation to experience duration in cinema, notwithstanding the considerable diminishment of scale. Rather than alertness as disposition towards the art house cinema, as supine bodied, we lay into the film’s world through this haptic encounter, to echo Laura U. Marks’ formulation.54 That outstretched arm returns as the last shot of the film, with a difference tilted towards uprightness. Moved further right, and up, the outstretched arm rests on the head of a sculpture. In the wide leftwards sections of the frame and further inwards, the far-ground gaiety, which abounds with the entire cast of the film dancing around a tall bonfire, unwinding out of the circle and queueing to exit into the clump of trees. I am less interested in the self-reflexive gesture of this ensemble of human protagonists, who have barely been in the same frame or mise en scène until now, communing at the end with the familiarity of a shoot that memoirs are written about, or prefiguring as that signature gesture of trees in Abbas Kiarostami’s films. Rather, I am fixated on that arm clasping, or simply resting, on the head of a sculpture with a posture familiar from the conventions of studio portraiture of a well-travelled landed gentry since Columbus: the hand resting on a globe or a human skull. Here, in the corner vector, it rests on a three-dimensional figure, reversing the gesture of the outwardly laid out palm in the opening shot. This provokes me to suggest that the arm seems to have landed at the end after having wrapped around, and wrapped up, the narrative. Such bindings that haul the cast head away from its first sighting on a long table during the soliloquy performed by a protagonist in the internal courtyard of the sprawling mansion in Dankuni (that was commandeered for the shoot of fifteen days) winds me into the world of the film. These bindings also have me track the head as it reappears in the long corridor that the protagonist walks through, picking up strewn drawings that seem to have fallen off the wall of his bedroom. Props and objects across the film offer a mise en abyme effect for the viewer, who is in the thrall of the film. Sightings of peripatetic objects, such as the cast head, nods in the direction of the expression of hauntings and temporal folds in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1972), the films and director familiar to any FTII student. Marooned objects mimicking antiquities and their persistent valuation in art practice, such as the one in this film, lead

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us out of a cinephiliac world into one of fine arts, the provenance of art cinema globally.55 The presence of this sculptural object and other artworks in the film (including etchings and even theatre and performance art) is not surprising, since for Amitabh Chakraborty, the run-up to the making of Kaal Abhirati was a time of immersion in twentieth-century avant-garde arts, particularly Dadaism and Marcel Duchamp.56 On my insistence to recall the process of Kaal Abhirati, Chakraborty offered a cryptic reference to Duchamp; but he elaborated in his conversation with Amrit Gangar that Nude Descending a Staircase N. 2 (1912) was a particular influence, despite bemoaning the fact that it had also been misappropriated for advertisements of men’s underwear57 : And the radical fringes of this ‘other’ Cinema are almost extinct. In the sense, how Marcel Duchamp’s work Nude Descending a Staircase is translated into an advert for men’s underwear. You see a man in an underwear coming down a staircase and you have multiple simultaneous images of the man at various stages of his descent. Every work of art is happening within the grand narrative of the market place. The narrative is held together by a morality enforced by the state, politics, and education. The weave is tight. Maybe age and decay might loosen it. If I manage to live long enough.

Notwithstanding the witticism of associations as a critique of capitalism, the evocation of Nude Descending a Staircase provokes me to consider another one of Duchamp’s works, a moving image piece of six minutes, Ane/mic Cine/ ma (1926), whose own fraught reception and subsequent canonisation within avant-garde cinema draws kinship with, or more appropriately, arrives as an accidental citation prevailing over this reading of Kaal Abhirati. Spiralling, convulsing, and producing the effects of zooms, the moving of discs and spoonerisms evoked by words written on discs, then provocative and banished, have since been declared avant-garde in the experiment of multimediums.58 Duchamp’s spinning wheels—where each disc moves separately, touching the others at various points, and at other points breaking away, but never fully losing contact—seems a fitting conceptual tool to approach Kaal Abhirati’s rampant disregard for linear storytelling, and equally for continuity of action in space and time across cuts. Although a feature length film—the long-held ruling format in Indian film culture, which is at odds with scriptures of the historical

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avant-garde, as well as Third Cinema—Kaal Abhirati’s unravelling bears an uncanny preoccupation with rotational possibilities originally spinning around Duchamp’s work. To be loose about this linking of arms, the one at the bottom of the frame and the one off-centre and mid-frame at the end, ropes around the narrative, suggesting another form of encircling, whereby I would like to hold the long ends of two reels—first and last—in the projection room against the protocols of the projectionists and have them both beaming on-screen. In the age of a video copy and beyond that, it seems prudent to resort to readings of the narrative so as to glean moments of contact and distance between different mises en scènes that the linear sequencing of projected film contravenes. Rather than thinking of the metaphors of ex-sanguination that Duchamp’s title evokes, I want to think of it as the disposition of coming out of deep slumber, from a hypnotic spell that Kaal Abhirati explores as it bends and curves to close in on distant spaces; a version of associative thinking that we have learned to associate with dreams, flashbacks, and non-linear narratives of art house modernist films, such as Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Rashomon (1950), and the entire corpus of Buñuel’s works. In an obvious gesture of coming around, this human figure, who occupies the role of a protagonist as a continuing figure through the film, lends his arm to a woman who collapses into a fainting spell at the hospital. Drawing on conventions familiar to romances in feature film, this chance encounter leads to a walk through the city to an upbeat song from C.I.D. (1956), playing on a gramophone, which accompanies the street performance of a magic trick. Edging towards the huddle, the newly formed couple witnesses the magician promise the audience to re-join a cutup body; he then collapses with the body under a sheet, and makes a rapid getaway. Thick with quotations, starting with the beguiling song from C.I.D. that the camera simulates by moving into the deep crimson red funnel of the gramophone blaring music, Chakraborty’s film has us drop into the reverie of a crime thriller with noir accents, replete with spiked drinks, double crossings, and femme fatales through the audio track. Onscreen, competing with that cinephiliac audio homage, is the (botched) trick of halving and re-joining a body, which provokes us to see it as some kind of pun on editing and splicing the ‘body’ of a strip of film so as to draw a chronology and a geography that is distinctive to cinema. This mise en abyme effect arrives as if on cue; this the film

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exploits as its own through the deployment of a cut, and by placing the couple in the narrow alleyways of north Kolkata (Fig. 7.4). As the camera holds back, the couple recedes to the curved end of a lane; the film cuts to have them in a medium-long shot, and tracks alongside as they walk up to the point of their exit rightwards. We continue to hear their chatter and the traffic sounds off-screen as the camera moves away, tracking leftwards. But we catch up with the couple in a lane, perpendicular to the tracking camera leftwards. A lateral inversion folds out in the next two shots. In a medium-long shot, we follow the leftwards route for awhile as the couple exits screen left; the camera moves rightwards and soon arrives at a perpendicular lane to re-join the couple yet again. Behind the conversing couple, ambling through these lanes that curve into more such lanes, we notice political slogans and graffiti etched on the walls that serve as markers of a period of left-wing supremacy. The couple’s flirty banter offers continuity but our orientation in this maze of lanes is off-kilter at best. When the camera, in its retraction, pauses at a

Fig. 7.4 Couple strolling through north Kolkata (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty)

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point we have not yet passed, so as to watch the couple at a perpendicular angle walking away from it, we arrive at a calculation of a fold of time that curves so as to meet in a moment past that recurs in the future. This bending of time and space, a distinctive feature of modernist philosophy that informs both painting and film, I propose, expresses a form of intermediality: one that stands for the other. Here, the relationship between the moving camera and the architecture of north Kolkata, with its maze of lanes, allows for the experience of time as curvature.59 Disorientation occurs earlier in the film too in a sprawling mansion where two figures can be seen circling across and within it, creating a déjà vu effect. In the second segment of the film, we meet our adult male protagonist for the first time, roused from sleep by the ringing of school bells. He lies in a bed of white sheets that looks out onto a long veranda. Here, the film cuts to another hallway where we catch another figure draped in a white sari. Recognizable as part of the iconography of such feudal mansions, the archetype of the widow walks as a ghostly leftover, born within a patriarchal arrangement of filial obligations and marital disasters; in this film, she surfaces as a figure in middle-ground and deep far-ground within the precincts of this mansion.60 As clearly rectangular as the mansion emerges to be with its spacious central courtyard with rooms and verandas squared off, the camera moves through these spaces as if to simulate an architectural labyrinth, propelled by the movement of human figures in one direction, and in tandem the camera in the opposite to close at a point of intersection. Further complications of directions abound when the camera follows walls, both interior and exterior, etched with political markings, and we are thrown into the maze of north Kolkata with a young boy and widow receding in the far-ground. Even more alienating are the vast corridors of uninhabited neighbourhoods of north Kolkata, further emphasized with the urban din off-screen. The effect of a web of pathways is further enhanced, and as metalepsis, our orientation through the couple’s wandering, or the camera, draws out the performance of the labyrinth. Here, metalepsis of the architectural bending of space challenges our notions of figure and ground as well as the received ideas on spatial continuity that resonate with many of the positions of the avant-garde and modernist artists globally in the long twentieth century. The heterosexual couple, whose chance meeting through an unprovoked fainting spell, comes into being through cinema’s relationship to architectural layouts: the maze of eighteenth-century north Kolkata

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following right upon a saunter through the park central to colonial geography. To put a fine point on it, the film’s rendition of the architecture of their romance exploits the iconography of the couple in cinema whose traversing of terrains serves as a metaphor for securing their romance. In their rendezvous through the city, they happen on the bare bones of an apartment building under construction. The woman recounts the layout of the older home and its continued presence, palpable despite being razed, creating a dialogue that serves for me as a commentary on hauntings and alienation that narratives of progress cannot occlude. The dialogue is further enhanced by a camera that backs up to tilt for a view of a tower under construction. The couple ignores warnings not to wander through the construction site, only to have their tryst end with his sudden death, his corpse lying at the bottom of a deep tunnel. The woman’s deadpan reaction and the elaborate care of a dhoticlad man covering the body signal the theatre of death that serves as a recursive theme of modernity’s end game with chance, accidents, and contingency, together working as incursions against the rationality of grids and routines. Such attention to architecture is reminiscent of Antonioni’s celebrated trilogy—L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’Eclisse (1962)— and reveals the film’s engagement with that cinema despite Chakraborty’s lack of enthusiasm for that filmmaker.61 Yet, it is another one of Antonioni’s films, Passenger (1975), that turns out to be cinematographer’s Sashikanth Ananthachari’s reference, and that long take moving across spaces, defying walls and straining the cinematographer’s body, turns out to be his inspiration while shooting the film. For Chakraborty, the inspiration towards collapsing planes of actions offers challenges to Euclidean geometry that Giorgio de Chirico accomplishes in his paintings, The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913), a personal favourite and a point of reference during the shoot. In contrast to the bending of space by torqueing architectural layouts and exacerbating our disorientation versus habituated notions of spatial continuity, the film effects a largesse in the opposite direction as well in an array of open arrangements for us to look at: sketches on the wall— but with a proviso, as a catch is in store. Soon after the opening long take, the film cuts to the mansion and its warren of rooms for subsequent set ups before showing our protagonist, however strained that moniker seems, wandering through the city of Kolkata. In the mansion’s bedroom, dressed up in white sheets after the drama of awakening, the film cuts to

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reveal one side of the wall that hitherto had been held back. Glued across on the bedroom wall are a set of drawings: three columns flanked on either side by a couple of single ones across four to five rows (Fig. 7.5). Halfway through the film, after a digression through the sights of the city with the couple and the precipitous end of our protagonist—the first of two deaths—we return to the mansion and find him not dead, but recumbent. In a still shot in the same bedroom, the camera focuses on the wall now displaying a new grouping of sketches: four columns with an unequal number of rows ranging from one to five drawings. With semblances to a grid, this cluster of sketches displays varied dimensions of rectangular sketch papers. The still camera records the protagonist stretching out of his slumber and slowly crawling under the bed to reemerge on the other side. He gives the sketches a good long stare, and we watch him in medium-long shot in the long take. The point is not that he has been aroused from the fatal crash from the prior sequence, rather we learn from the rearranged and redrawn sketches that arrangements of sequencing order in films, as a rule, are arbitrarily the seal of an auteur most visible when extant conventions are shown up to be dominant and

Fig. 7.5 Ruchir Joshi’s sketches on the bedroom wall (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty)

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primed to be reworked. We do not leave the slumber room for too long this time, save for a street performance scene, art style, staged at night with two drunks on the far side of the road brawling under the lights of a Lucas-TVS showroom and a trained actor performing a one-act skit in direct address; the wit of calculating absurdity is not lost on us. When we do return to the mansion in the full force of morning light, on the wall are further additions and subtractions to the array of sketches, shaping them into a larger panel of drawings. As we read them up and down, which calls upon reading strategies honed from flipping pages of graphic novels, rightwards or leftwards, in which panels of drawings suggest either continuity and disjunctions despite the gutters—the gap or interval between drawings signals ellipses. Having drawn up close to the ubiquity of graphic novels does not subdue the long practice of storyboarding that Eisenstein relied on for his own theorization of montage in which the interval between frames served as a shock trigger directed at the spectator. Decades later, the extensive storyboarding adopted by Satyajit Ray revealed his facility with drawing, and in our contemporary interests in animation and graphic novels point to this film’s enduring resonances with various art practices. Such was the case with the provenance of these sketches as well. From the large laboratory of friends and artists in Kolkata, Chakraborty sought the collaboration of filmmaker-artist-novelist Ruchir Joshi who was at that point doodling, sketching, and playing with the idea of making a film himself. With a preference for double-ended Luxor markers, Joshi drew twenty to twenty-five sketches at Chakraborty’s behest. Thick line drawings and further shadings would hasten the wonkiness of that favoured nib, but not before the drawings were done. From Joshi’s recollection of that directive, the sketches were to relay an obsessive recall of the protagonist’s childhood. Picking up strewn drawings was an act that registered as an enduring detail from the shooting and subsequent screening of the film. Spaced across the film, Joshi’s drawings and their arrangement were at Chakraborty’s discretion and the desire to summon a narrative through them lies entirely with our submission to read panels both vertically and horizontally: a reading possibility that consolidates in the digital age with a contraband copy that can be stilled even if it rails against the duration intended by the filmmaker in its analogue projection days.62 What would have been arresting in the unspooling of the film and available only as the duration of the shot in a theatre transforms viewing

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experience with digital preservation; the pause function reveals drawings despite the risk of pixilation and noise. Up close, we see stick figures of children, receding architecture to suggest depth, winged bird-like creatures, and a singular outline of a bell. It is intriguing (and vexing) to consider the relationship between the panels with little help from the artist-protagonist, except in a roundabout fashion in the form of a family outing to Alipore Zoo when he reminisces about repeatedly drawing giraffes, page after page. In this remark there is something akin to an inclination towards sequencing that surfaces, a feature of panel drawings and a hallmark of unspooling film. The father’s wish to access a bird’s eye view during a moment of seated conviviality under the trees cannot help but remind us that a high point of view is one of the organizations of the perceptual regime that the cinematic apparatus affords, and its place in narrative cinema conveys as an establishing shot in the form of a panorama.63 Considered together, a slight outline of selfreflexivity on the presentation of visual props induces additional features that draw the film within the orbit of global modernisms that heighten the mise en abyme aspects for the viewer.64 A while later, a different set of drawings are strewn around the bedroom floor, with the protagonist-artist lying recumbent on the floor. This addition and distribution of a set of drawings off the wall onto the floor encourages an even closer attention to them. The film will increasingly endow them with tactility that eventually moves them to the foreground; props become attributes. The last time we are in the bedroom, the drawings fall one by one in front of the camera, as if pinned up on that wall they are the frontier between the pro-filmic and the staging of the mise en scène in the film. As a definitive gesture of modernism in cinema, the film’s association with other arts—drawings in this instance—puts a fine point on collaborations in art cinema that can be updated as an iteration of intermediality. The performance of dropping the drawings in front of the camera ties to the countdown of all the self-reflexive gestures that require updating for the viewer as intermedial interconnectedness in the world of the film. Sound recording and performance show up in the figure of a sound recordist who happens to trail the family through the zoo recording bird sounds and, accidentally, their chatter; this in turn returns us to the gramophone playing a vinyl of a song from the film Mr. & Mrs. 55 (1955) alongside the magician’s show in the park. Closing with all of the characters in the film dancing around a camp fire in the final shot gathers the

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film’s cast in a scene that could have been straight from Badal Sircar’s political street theatre: a miming that is all the more evident with the theatre aficionado playing the father.65 At the end of the countdown, a blazing bonfire bears the primal trope of creation and destruction of arts, including film shoots. Wide in scope and confident in stride, Kaal Abhirati performs a deep intimacy with the works of post-war European cinemas: the selfavowed declaration of having seen Straub and Huillet’s films at a repertory screening in Kolkata is Chakraborty’s signal influence. Yet also evident are the homage to Godard’s direct address to the camera in the performance staged in the mansion courtyard and the aleatory structure of wandering, a distinctive feature of Antonioni’s films. Gina Marchetti’s keen attention to the influence of European masters on Chinese language cinemas and the riposte that shapes art cinemas offer a long overdue corrective to the Eurocentric view of post-war cinemas; Kovács’ broad history is a fine example with its focus away from Paris.66 That film schools and post-war nation-state culture industries were invested in disseminating European cinemas is only half the story; that they were absorbed and engaged with uncommon rigour to fashion a cinema in authentic ways is the story that Gina Marchetti tells, and I continue to do just that here. The drawings on the wall of the bedroom produce the mise en abyme effect of arrangements, the row and columns showing angles and distances towards various European cinemas. In that long slumber of resting in the ruins of feudal splendour, ruins of modernism also come into play. The bereft widow wandering in the far-ground, also a figure of colonial enlightenment, suggests a different historicity in the narrative of the here and now that abjures the previous string of associations. In this regard, the dream logic of association that the Surrealists mined and that Luis Buñuel expanded to extended storytelling in narrative cinema surfaces as yet another vector to read Kaal Abhirati’s project. In a moment of unconscious admission to Rafey Mahmood, a cinematographer who collaborated on Chakraborty’s Cosmic Sex, I uttered: ‘Kaal Abhirati is the last modernist text.’ To elaborate on that cryptic revelation, I consider the film’s performance of rigour, alienation, and aleatory qualities to be fitting attributes for that utterance. That all of this would be strung together through the iconography of a recumbent figure is the film’s precociousness and its collaboration with the global avant-garde: to sleep through postcolonial modernization is as strident a

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strike as possible. Or at the very least to be half awake to its rumble is one kind of retreat. Having acknowledged and footnoted the expansive engagement with European cinema that we recognize in Kaal Abhirati is half the story and runs the risk of it being cast aside as a derivative work. Instead, in its deep familiarity and engagement with European cinemas, the film leads us to impasses that such storytelling delivers, and slumber allows us to see other ways out of alienation and rigour. The frequently recumbent protagonist or the film narrative that refuses to deliver a firm drive through cause and action does not close the possibilities in the film. I have to be emphatic about this since I fear the machinations of these homages are what activates Chakraborty’s own distance from this early work. As always films know more, and Kaal Abhirati is no different. When the film moves away from the iconography of the sleeping figure, and the variations of its kind in the moving image—coming alive, fainting, wandering, hints of somnambulism—the diurnal cycle wheels into the night. In a clearing of four streets with none of the day traffic clogging it, the camera stays on a tableau vivant of a Kali Puja. At medium-long distance, we behold two tall mock-up straw figures of Kali in familiar regalia of flowing tresses, a garland of heads to give her the fearsome look desired by worshippers. Closer to us is the now familiar back of our protagonist, seated in a reverential cross-legged posture facing the religious icons. Smoke rising from unseen incense pots adds to the texture of worship familiar in temples, and in the depths of darkness, a fitting tribute to the gods of the night. On the soundtrack, the rich gravelly singing of Hindustani classical music maestro Ustad Amir Khan’s student, Pichinto, singing an incantation heightens the senses of this nightly ritual, emphasized further by the circumambulation of four figures—widows— whose steps now acquire a devotional purpose. Spellbound! The scene brings together previously forlorn objects: widows skulking in homes; Kali figures appearing in the alleyway amidst the smoke; their replicas standing in the background of the courtyard towards the end of the film and again appearing when the protagonist ascends to the terrace of the mansion; and dressed up Jatra figures wandering through the ruins of homes among marooned straw Kalis. An assembly of these features, previously dispersed throughout the film but now arranged in the middle as a tableau vivant, plays on the concept of a cutaway in narrative films. As early as Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), the insert of varying

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duration has serviced as metaphors in narrative films. Michelson’s reading of such images (extra-diegetic) in Eisenstein’s October (1928) pivots on the evocation of a primitive impulse.67 A similar move recurs in Noa Steimatsky’s readings of later works of Pasolini, where she plots a turn towards themes of pre-modern Christendom and a turn towards tableaux vivants most directly recorded in Pasolini’s writings. The quick run towards Pasolini is equally obvious in Chakraborty’s admiration for the director’s turn away from neorealism, a move detectable as a synchrony of interests in their joint exploration of worlds imagined outside the schedule of modernization and progress. Rising incense vapours from the feet of the giant-sized fearsome Kali icons, with the devout widows circling, conjures a scene familiar to the night worship of the gods associated with Tantric practices, often apart from the official, upper-class and upper-caste Hindu habitus. As we look on, mesmerized by Pichinto’s sonorous voice in the extension of an overture, the plotlessness of the film hijacks us into the world of ‘pure cinema’; such assemblage would be dissonant at best for the devotee, with different theatres of worship—Kali worship and Hindustani music—arranged together. In this fiction of other times, Kaal Abhirati returns us to the immense possibilities of anachronisms in cinema—and its older parent, painting—of worlds that are not tethered to notions of verification or committed to representation. By acquiescing to this world of smoky images and the swells of baritone voices (on the soundtrack) set in an impossible space of a busy crossroads in Kolkata is to think beyond the colonial regimes of zoo gardens, contemporary economies of construction, or feudal ruins, and instead imagine the death of diurnal regimentation in favour of nocturnal rituals, equally infidel and not indexical.68 The evocation of Kali traditions is far from monolithic, as the film presents in the tableau vivant frontal shots that we gaze upon. In this particular film, the preferred icon is Kali without her consort, a particular form of worship that has alliances with the Shakti cults of Bengal. Only a prompt from the filmmaker, in the most elusive way and after several years, was I offered a name of this underground form, ‘Berupa Kali.’ Equally unfamiliar, except for within various documentaries on Kali and Durga pujas, is the display of the straw scaffolding of an idol midconstruction. The norm among sculptors and crafts folks is to refrain from showing works in progress, believing in the inauspiciousness of displaying an unfinished work. As part of a film raging against orthodoxy, this was a fitting inclusion, but the production crew soon dropped their support

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after a series of mishaps plagued the shooting of these Kali scenes. The production manager weighed in, suggesting that the only way the film would have a chance at completion was if the director appeased the goddess at the presiding Kali temple with a fitting puja (offering). Upon completion and release, Kaal Abirathi gained a reputation as being a conduit for death cults, allegedly initiated by Chakraborty. Such ‘customs’ have been outlawed since the colonial era; consequently, the suicide of a post-production crew member provoked police to begin an investigation. In the foggy areas of prohibitions instituted by the state, over both cinema and religious customs, that risqué films can activate, Kaal Abirathi redraws these technics of the modern state by reviving lost forms that remind us of the wealth of engagements with the worlds that are suppressed. As it wends its way through post-war cinema archive, even as it traverses the alleyways of Kolkata, claiming these as its own, we get a sense of Chakraborty’s iconoclasm pitted against the dominant neorealism of art cinemas of India—and a ringing endorsement for the art in cinemas. One outlier recognizes another, and such was the case after a special screening at Nandan, years after the initial release with Gautam Chattopadhyay in the audience. A renegade, whose film Nagmoti (1983) about snake goddesses remains a cult favourite after being restored from the lower rungs of B-films to mythopoetic heights, Chattopadhyay fronted one of the first Bengali rock bands and was the fulcrum of an avant-garde that had little to do with parliamentary politics.69 At the end of the screening, Chattopadhyay and Chakraborty, who had never met before, recognized a fellow traveller in the other. In a fond recall, Chakraborty recalls the exchange: ‘Thanks for the trip! And from me, here is a gift.’ The gift was marijuana oil, long used for its psychedelic potential by the wandering Bauls of Bengal, whose affiliation with counter-culture has been well recorded; Chattopadhyay was a star in these circles of Kolkata. In my reckoning, Kaal Abhirati had arrived as the cult film in that handing over of the gift from Chattopadhyay to Chakraborty, Nagamoti to Kaal Abhirati.

Amitabh Chakraborty, Documentary Impulse Against all the efforts at silencing by the dominant taste of art house viewers, and a contraband attachment to it as a cult object by cinephiles, Kaal Abhirati was anointed by the cultural and literary avant-garde by

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Gautam Chattopadhyay and Dipak Majumdar, who had all the verve and inheritance of the Hungryalist artists, the cultural avant-garde of the 1960s.70 The Hungry Generation’s cosmopolitanism evident in their literary taste, which agitated against received canons, was the torch that both Chattopadhyay and Majumdar still carried. Being unaware of Amitabh Chakraborty before the release of the film did not deter their total embrace of it as the heir to their own projects; Kriitiban’s literary incursions had found kin in Kaal Abhirati. Following the screening at Nandan, Amitabh remembers the beginning of a friendship with Chattopadhyay and Majumdar that had them hanging out for days on end in each other’s homes after screenings at Max Mueller or Nandan: three to four days of adda where cigarettes and marijuana chased booze and music. A rearrangement of energies would have them head off to a country bar, as in Kaal Abhirati, where smoke-filled, booze-fuelled chats and arguments would hit a feverish pitch with a larger group of hangers-on joining in. On days when Ananthachari would show up with some real cash gained from shooting a mainstream film, the mise en scène of the adda would shift en masse to the Olympia Bar on Park Street, a salon that nurtured the politicization of college students in the 1960s, and about which legends have been written in the coffee house cultures of Kolkata.71 Kaal Abhirati had a long afterlife as an ethic that outlived its life as a projected moving image in those days of fraternal bonhomie; Chakraborty credits Majumdar for sharing and leading him out of bourgeois precincts into the ranks of subaltern life. A former Rhodes scholar, ‘Dipak had declassed himself’ and that journey to the far reaches outside the class and caste hierarchies provided a real education on the cultures of the subaltern. As often would be the case, the lot of them would head off to their corners to devote themselves to their own crafts as well. Chattopadhyay was shuttling between producing music—rock and Baul—and making films; a romantic persona would govern his aesthetic practice. In contrast, Majumdar’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Bengali cultures, far from the pristine quarters of the middle class (Bhadralok), had him emerge as a central figure of off-beat cultures, nurturing the disposition of the Hungryalists whose poetry would resonate with Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poets, the frequenters of City Lights Bookstore, and others.72 As the co-editor of Kriitiban (until his fallout with Sunil Gangopadhyay), Majumdar was the reason for the continuing presence of the Hungryalist artists in that scene and beyond. Subsequently, it was his long stint with

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the Jesuit priest Gaston Roberge at the Chitrabani media institute that had him draw in aspiring filmmakers and artists to the world of cinema through workshops, seminars, publications, and above all, offering them a place to hang out. With Kaal Abhirati, the avant-garde had found its object in cinema, and new vistas subsequently opened from Majumdar’s collaborations with Chakraborty at Chitrabani. After Kaal Abhirati, a move towards a different engagement with fine arts had Chakraborty collaborating with artist Hiran Mitra on what was to become Kitsch Mitsch (1995), yet another of his lost works.73 With little to rely on except Chakraborty’s avowed affection for the lost film, it appears to draw upon Mitra’s crossover work as both theatre artist and book designer. This model of practice mirrors the concert of arts in play in Chakraborty’s own first feature film as well as in the rich range of such engagements with the performing arts of India: by other filmmakers including Arun Khopkar, Soudhamini, Satyajit Ray, Sashikanth Ananthachari, Ramani, and Ranjan Palit. The lure of the documentary hangs over Chakraborty’s work, starting with his early expedition to the Andaman Islands. During the mid-1990s, funding for documentary films from the Central Government required a special dispensation, to the tune of five lakh rupees for each young filmmaker, who was expected to make films on a budget of one lakh rupee each. These films were to be underwritten and broadcast on Doordarshan 3 Channel (DD 3), and in Bengal these were shown on DD Bangla.74 As an awardee of these grants, Chakraborty’s collaboration with Ananthachari had a prolific outburst, allegedly some of the most memorable documentary films in this period, all of them now deemed lost. Both men have recounted in oral interviews how they responded to the strictures of the DD Bangla film that was restricted to twenty-two minutes in length. With funding in place and adventurous spirit to spare, the two of them headed off to record a range of Bengali folk arts from Jatra to Pattachitra. The eponymous Jatra was seen as a ‘flamboyant Kaal Abhirati!’ In the large and disorderly archive of DD Kolkata, these films await a second life when exhumed. As was the case with Media Classic in Mumbai (whose story is rehearsed in Chapter 4, ‘Bombay Noir’), the burgeoning cable television industry was also expanding its range into documentary filmmaking, and a private channel called Chakra, thriving in the late 1990s until the early 2000s, commissioned a slew of short documentary films of ten to fifteen minutes in length, as ‘fillers’ between long format programmes. As two of

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the filmmakers commissioned to make five such films, Ananthachari and Chakraborty journeyed to Orissa on a two-day shoot that yielded five to six films. One memorable film was Ravan Naach that encapsulated a particular dance form associated with Kelucharan Mohapatra that has pre-pubescent boys as the mainstay. In addition to these films, there are two other works now missing: a Dutch channel commissioned a film on the religious cult figure Sai Baba titled Notes from the Underground and another on Josh Brooks, an architect in Puducherry, an NFDC-funded project. Ongoing tensions between evanescent practices and modern urges of ordering knowledge find their pitch in Amitabh Chakraborty’s films, and this tension is available for scrutiny in his three surviving works. Long after Dipak Majumdar and Gautam Chattopadhyay’s passing, the days spent in conversation at country liquor bars continued, lubricated by local hooch and arrack (sold at a reasonable price of eleven to twelve rupees for a tall bottle). Those days would provide the impulse for Bishar Blues , Cosmic Sex, and several lost others; films that are an ode to the fraternal bonhomie enjoyed in a period before liberalization and turbo-rogue global capitalism. ‘I made these films for them,’ Chakraborty pronounces, conjuring their presence as audience, albeit posthumous. These projects of recording art forms across the length and breadth of Bengal in Chakraborty’s avowed style of ‘observational documentary’ have an archival impulse to them; their briefs are all too often dictated by the funding agencies whose subsidies underwrite the ventures. A subaltern historiography demands alternative ways of comprehending this world, not just the instrumental technic of oral interviews, but also ethnography and other radical methods of engagement that disavow preservation altogether, and yet hold onto the ephemeral accents of these practices. The irony is not lost on me that the very act of preserving these forms onscreen—on U-matic tapes or on Hi-band video—towards aggregating an archive, would go the way of lost works, thus provoking an archaeological dispensation by a cinema studies scholar writing on this auteur. Chakraborty’s lack of archival disposition (uttered as ‘let them go!’) speaks vehemently against the Cartesian impulse to categorize forms of knowledge that have long governed historiographical projects in India; the physical archive is seen as an all-encompassing repository, despite the obvious limits set by these very endeavours when confronting obsolescence and budgetary constraints. From a different direction, such an embrace of impermanence seems to have shaped Chakraborty’s projects.

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They are about the philosophy of travels, searches, and humility towards permanence, archives, and life in the same beat—a fakiri ethos for both the filmmaker and scholar-cinephile. Despite the great frustration of this scholar, and the consternation of cinephiles, Chakraborty’s lack of interest in the afterlife of his films lends these lost objects a certain aura. One possible route of recovery of these lost works is to track down the few that were commissioned by Kolkata Doordarshan, stacked in a storage room whose retrieval methods remain opaque and bound by recalcitrant procedures; at least the presence of such a container offers a ray of hope to subsequent scholarship. The largest trove of lost films by Chakraborty is the series commissioned by Chakra, a private cable channel that had a significant impact on independent documentary makers and where Putul Mahmood was then the commissioning editor. Chakraborty’s own proposal was to shoot five folk performance forms around Puri in Orissa, but whose survival in the nascent culture of capitalism, mergers, and bankruptcies, had the entire collection of finished works—a high stash of them—disappear into the black hole of corporate neglect.75 In a career plagued by a lengthy list of lost films, somewhere between ten and twelve films—even an exact figure eludes Chakraborty’s reckoning, given whether the emphasis is on completion of a shoot or the release of a work—a lacuna stares back at me. To offer a narrative of the move from Kaal Abhirati to Bishar Blues would have been better served with the possession of the commissioned works, even Kitsch Mitsch may have offered a point in between. Such a trove would have equally allowed for an exploration of the arc of a career from 35mm to Hi-band filmmaking that would arrive at the digital. Another missed opportunity is a viewing of several of those films on the folk traditions of Bengal and Orissa so as to behold the careful crafting of duration of performance to the meter of a short film: How do you convert an all-night performance into the duration of a twenty-two-minute film? Yet another pathway not taken would have allowed us to experience the cinema of Bengal, away from Kolkata, yet connected to popular forms—a figuration of tableau vivant—one of the conversations points I have had with Chakraborty. To sit with this immeasurable loss and overcome archiving adversities forces me to consider other routes of framing, including a curatorial briefing that has to account for a long editing career.76

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To label Chakraborty as a director is only half the story. Graduating as an editor from FTII, a remit that has often led to thick collaborations in a range of projects made by the independent set of his generation from across India, Chakraborty’s affiliations include Mandira Mitra, Soudhamini, Chalam Bennurkar, Arvind Sinha, Ranjan Palit, R.V. Ramani, Piyush Shah, Rajan Khosa, and Mahadeb Shi, among others. As a regular teacher of master classes in editing at FTII, Chakraborty’s familiarity and facility with varying rhythms of films and the differing demands of directors emphasized the art of editing. Another tempo and another beat were reserved for his own film, Kaal Abhirati, which he handed over to a different editor, Mahadeb Shi, also attached to this scene in Kolkata. To date, Chakraborty has edited over a hundred films, a staggering number that spans his assembling footage of well-known and awardwinning experimental fiction and non-fiction films, short- and long-form, including his own and those of established and emerging filmmakers whose works circulate across festivals and at times, television. In addition to the filmmakers with whom he had ties through FTII of his years, the roster now includes, Sabiha Sumar, Kabir Mohanty, Putul Mahmood, among others. The impressive list of works and awards for editing places Chakraborty at the centre of the independent documentary culture of the 1990s onwards, editing films in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata. As is often said among filmmakers, documentary films come alive on the editing table, are given shape at an editing console, and salvage clips of beautiful footage into a masterful narrative by a film editor. In one way or another his own films must have been responding to other similar works around, that were also contending with recording performing traditions of Bengal. A central proponent of this scene of alternative culture was Dipak Majumdar and claims of his deep familiarity with subaltern culture, outside the urban perimeter, were made by others as well. His entry into experiments in filmmaking is most evident in his role in Joshi’s Egaro Mile/Eleven Miles (1992), which conveys all the makings of Majumdar’s performance as a star and inaugurates Joshi’s own entry into filmmaking. Joshi’s status was as an amateur, but whose reputation as a writer for the international literary magazine Granta was already widely recognized and would stick for decades thereafter. To further recall, Joshi is the artist who supplied the doodles for Kaal Abhirati, and I have to imagine a certain

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volleying of differing engagements with the arts between filmmakers firing the discussions at film screenings. To move ahead by backtracking, I want to consider Bishar Blues as a response to other films on Bauls, Egaro Mile being the most prominent of them all. Such a reframing of loss in the archive creates a dialogue with other works and moves away from considering a single auteur’s oeuvre.

Ruchir Joshi’s Egaro Mile/Eleven Miles Undergirding the rolling in of the second wave of art cinema leads us to the economics of shooting on 16mm, which had long been the stronghold of documentary production in India. Joshi’s retroactive narrative of Kolkata of the late 1970s and 1980s opens with this declaration77 : In the later 1970s and ’80s, many of us in India who wanted to be filmmakers thought mainly of feature films. The documentary was a waystation, something you did to keep in practice, till you could embark upon a full-length fiction film.

The quick volte face that ensues sparks a fascination with the varied possibilities available in the documentary form that Joshi describes. The run-ins and hurdles of producing under the strapped conditions of equipment and distribution herald his arrival into filmmaking, after having made his mark as both writer and artist with Eleven Miles ; this trajectory is of a piece with the production process of Kaal Abhirati. To imagine that the 16mm camera was being shuttled between Ananthachari and Ranjan Palit for their respective films is not off the mark, nor is the thought that they would find themselves by chance in the queue right beside each other at the processing labs in Chennai/Madras, the Rupayan Colour Labs in Salt Lake City, or even exchanging tales of bureaucratic battles with procuring film stock, or tribulations with the soundtrack that always disappoints as the cans fly out of the lab. These are consonances in the arrangement of the dispositif serving as volleys across Kolkata and beyond; Kaal Abhirati and Egaro Mile zigzagging through a community of viewers in thrall to a new language of cinema. Long in production—with some schedule overlaps with Kaal Abhirati—and committed to a small budget and crew (there are even overlaps in editing credits for Mahadeb Shi for both films), Eleven Miles moves

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the Bauls out of ethnographic films and into the diary film. Implicitly aware of George Luneau’s film Le Chant des Fous/Songs of the Madmen (1979) on the Bauls, and sharply attentive to the international allure that was endowed upon the Bauls from the Beat Poets to the Hungryalists onwards, Joshi’s film strikes a different note to acknowledge the filmmaker’s fascination that mingles with a measure of deracination from these practices. What was born was not the 30-minute film initially commissioned but a magnum opus, 160 minutes in length, unfolding as Joshi’s avowed diary with an insistence on the subjective voice, characteristic of an essay film, but like no other film before. An aleatory structure, a voice-over unlocked from the mastery accorded conventionally to it, a self-reflexivity on the act of filming that ranges from subjects speaking to the camera, or just right or left of the camera to the director, a lack of factual details on Baul singers per se, and absence of an argument— all cast Eleven Miles as an ‘essay film’ (itself an over-stuffed portmanteau that has been emerging in Cinema Studies but seems fitting as a working definition for Joshi’s film as well). In the last couple of decades, writings on the essay film have identified French and German non-narrative films as the presumptive origin of its development, given the generous financial support from the state, vibrant discourse on this mode of filmmaking, and the discourses on the horrors of war that non-narrative film strives to address; Paul Arthur, Timothy Corrigan, and Laura Rascaroli among others have proposed that these experiments deserve reclassification.78 I want to recall from Paul Arthur’s elegant primer his suggestion that ‘one way to think about the essay film is as a meeting ground for documentary, avant-garde, and art film impulses.’79 Arthur, Corrigan, and Rascaroli concur that while the essay film eludes a clear definition, it does relay its ontological state as a form that changes, meanders, and transgresses. In a not so dissimilar situation, it is worth considering that robust nonnarrative independent filmmaking in India deserves to be pried away from being considered as documentary film en masse, a nomenclature that is handy but has indeed run its course. The burgeoning of personal and diary films at the very least give the lie to such sweeping gestures of classification suffered by these films and begs consideration of different genealogies: early Anand Patwardhan versus later, home movies, and epistolary films among others. An emphasis on the retroactive reckoning detectable in Joshi’s account, as Eleven Miles undergoes digitisation at Berlin Arsenal, has him recalling

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a range of works blossoming out of this vast corpus that gathers under the nomination of the documentary, the favoured title, easy to grasp for organizers of retrospectives and funding agencies. The most emphatically post facto detail is his acknowledgement of Haroun Farocki’s works that would have only been available well after Eleven Miles was made. Rather than cite a point of influence, synchronicity in the global practices of nonfiction deserves noting and is revealed in this homage that arrives with the availability of Farocki’s works in various formats and his frequent presence in India in the new millennium. While I want to move Joshi’s film into the diary film—an off-shoot of the essay form as further expounded upon by Rascaroli—it does not come unstuck from the contours of documentary film circulation, and the reception that dogs it. As hamstrung as the film may be in this typology, its rehearsal of breakouts echoes Bill Nichols’ call: the epistemological contours of documentary are in dire need of reconsideration.80 In ‘Documentary film and the modernist avant-garde,’ he damns the rising prominence of John Grierson’s documentary filmmaking at the cost of containing the revolutionary poetics of 1920s avant-garde; ‘Modernist (sic.) elitism and textual difficulty were qualities to be avoided,’ remarks Nichols. An overdetermined set of circumstances will displace the state ‘from its central position in documentary practice’ when ‘work in the 1970s returned to modernist techniques.’81 Nichols’ provocation of a furtive relationship between avant-garde and documentary practices is a revisionist exercise that, despite his exclusive focus on European and American films, finds subsequent comradeship with both Okwui Enzewor and Geeta Kapur’s sightings of the ‘documentary turn’ in contemporary global art practices, recognizable as avant-garde in unexpected ways.82 Rhetorically, Nichols’ undertaking remains diligent in its careful archiving of American avant-garde films but towards the end, the essay moves out of an admonishing tone towards ‘a utopian invocation’ by recalling Maya Deren’s 1946 publication, An Anagram of Ideas of Film, Form, and Art. It recasts her call for filming rituals as a ‘socially engaged, ethically informed space for a new avant-garde.’ This is nothing short of a breathtaking finale that sweeps the reader out of the impasse caused by a biting critique of Grierson’s ‘sobering ritual of civic participation,’ by offering a route that rehearses the essay’s iconoclastic spirit.83 Nichols’ lurch, a hurried approach, towards Deren’s writings ventriloquises Catherine Russell’s formulations twice over, one in 1999 and in a modified version, 2003.84 But there is a difference in emphasis that

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is pertinent for a pause. Oriented towards the filmmaker’s excursions to Haiti, Russell convenes Deren’s writings to discuss the allure that rituals held for her, not just any but the trials of filming possession rituals in particular; Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s film Trance and Dance in Bali (made in the 1930s, released in 1952) was her inspiration. Deren is not exceptional, rather as Russell narrates in a brilliant line-up of appraisals, Jean Rouch’s filming of possession rituals in Niger remains a cornerstone of ethnographic filmmaking.85 If Deren was at a loss with her filmed footage, opting instead for prose, Rouch’s film despite, its notoriety, could not conceal the filmmaker’s own enthralled position vis-à-vis the ritual, ‘ciné-transe,’ which united with Artaud in their spotting of theatrical aspects that deemed them ‘found surrealism.’ However, Russell delineates a quandary facing such projects: it is one matter to be mesmerized by the trance of the spectators and the productive strains against realism emanating from such rituals, and quite another to view them as films when they appear as nothing more than spectacular theatre. At times the rhythm of a long night of dance finds no equivalence in editing.86 Additionally, voice-over narration runs the risk of being distant, the effect of trance long lost, notes Russell on such procedures of recording. In her initial formulation, Russell wanders towards Bill Viola’s video I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986) as the final text in her reading, its placement accords it as a ‘more successful version of the ciné-transe imagined by Rouch,’ and the medium specificity of video with its electronic signals allows for special effects. Additionally, by expunging the explanatory voice-over, the soundtrack amplifies the hypnotic drumming, and inserted into a longer video with no conventional sign posts it allows the viewer intimations of an alternate reality. Assembled to highlight films that challenge realism through their focus on filming possession rituals, these works, Russell reiterates at the end, offer ‘the Utopian impulse (…) pointing to other forms of knowledge and representation.’87 Circumscribing performance spaces—and filming up close an entire song with the run-up to those moments requiring green-room style preparation—has long emerged as a convention in both music documentaries and ritual performances; the focus on the duration of performance is a particular problem for documentary films. By taking on the likes of the journey film as a form of revealing its process, Joshi’s Eleven Miles caps the compendium impulse of such films and places at centre stage the very act of documenting. At the same time, the film never gives the performance itself short shrift; we are enthralled

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by Kartik’s soaring voice as Joshi dresses up in the far-ground. At another point in the film, in the makeshift performance space of a hotel bedroom, we are in the grip of a Baul’s melancholy as he belts out a song, captivating Majumdar’s avid attention at the edge of a bed that doubles as a bar. Majumdar’s charisma as the connoisseur and chronicler of the Baul scene competes with the mellifluousness of the singing, as he holds forth on the boat that is sailing gently on the Ganges, emerging as a god of the underground. Along with Gautam Chattopadhyay, Majumdar would be the north star for utopian projects and cosmologies that these aspiring filmmakers were seeking; the long shadows of the Hungryalist artists would follow them. Punctuating the film are Majumdar’s elaborations of Baul trajectories from the hinterlands of Bengal all the way to Laussane, framed on a gentle swerving boat; long-take handheld compositions are aided by an arm that extends into the frame towards him, offering him a tall, cool bottle of beer. This offering doubles as phatic, cajoling him towards another tale of another Baul’s journey, and opening the composition towards the placement of the camera, a performance in itself. I cannot help but recall the outstretched arm in Kaal Abhirati, whose ascetism, by contrast, invites my embodied slide into the film. The careful rigour of Kaal Abhirati seems distant from the free style of Eleven Miles , yet their common resort to mise en abyme gestures through drawings brings out unexpected affinities. Joshi’s drawings, as we have already seen, emerge as a figure of intermediality in Kaal Abhirati. In his own film, a neat map of Bengal stretches wide into the frame and, as we journey through Baul territory, we return to this prop that Joshi doodles upon with a thick nib that has the verve of brush strokes; intersecting circles fill up the space and we can discern the details of a map of Bengal. Doodles prevail over the grids of cartography, a fitting figure for a film that has gone hither and thither, railing against cataloguing and systematicity, offering yet another feature of an essay film. Joshi’s voice-over that tilts the film towards the personal, offers another line of difference from conventional documentary fare. To be precise, mixed in post-production, the sound design, including the voice-over, evokes a timeline in ‘expository modes’ that is at considerable variance from sync-sound, also a prevailing strategy in observational documentary films.88 In its overtly first-person rendition, the voice-over assumes the various guises of the personal, including a conflation with the filmmaker—an inference that places Joshi’s film along with others as ‘personal

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documentary.’ This is a genre that surfaces in tracts on the aesthetics of independent documentary no longer beholden to state funding and in opposition to the Films Division’s preference for a singular commentator. In the poverty of terms besetting a range of productions, embarking in directions beyond the Grierson model that held sway over mainstream Films Division productions, as well as several independent works, nonfiction appears as a salutary placeholder for films produced in India. Yet, limited in conceptual scope given its premature adversarial relationship to the fictional, coupled with the tenuous place that realism has in this new wave of filmmaking, certain of these allegedly ‘non-fiction’ films encourage a closer consonance with the essay film as proposed initially by André Bazin and revived most productively in the tracts by Laura Rascaroli and Timothy Corrigan.89 Rascaroli’s parsing of the style further serves up categories such as the ‘Diary Film’ and ‘The Notebook Film,’ pegs between which I will place Eleven Miles as a hybrid.90 Both categories are united by personal monologues according to Rascaroli91 : The diary, however, is already form, imposed by an activity of recollection and reordering that takes place at some temporal and critical distance, even when very modest, from the events. Lighter and more agile, the notepad accompanies us, always at easy reach, and allows us to jot down ideas, impressions and projects as they emerge, while they still are sketchy and magmatic.

Although not elaborated upon, Rascaroli underplays the role of the soundtrack as a defining principle on matters of the personal. In this regard, I want to consider how attending to soundtracks, particularly the voice-over, can animate ‘diary’ or ‘notebook’ modes of presentation in films that pull in different directions otherwise. The detected personal in Joshi’s film squarely emerges from the first-person voice-over whose relationship to the images is at tandem, sparingly at best and even contradictory, as ‘personal’ as the diary form and as ‘sketchy’ as the notebook, yet neither one entirely. Such belabouring of voice-over comes within earshot of Michel Chion’s provocative privileging of voice-over image.92 Attuning feature films towards sound, Chion’s acousmêtre makes a point in drawing out those moments when the voice decouples from the body; a telephone conversation and an off-screen space collude to divert our attention as viewers, forcing the diegesis to veer off beyond the frame, for instance.93

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Far from a settled schema, Chion notes its dynamism: ‘More and more frequently, the acousmêtre is becoming a complicated, calculating being. The cinema of each period gets the acousmêtre it deserves.’94 Indeed, Joshi’s voice-over heralds a form that ends the contract with the objective (more often than not, masculine) voice-over presiding over the footage; the age of the personal had indeed arrived in what was left of the term ‘documentary film.’ New forms deserve new names and Joshi’s Eleven Miles is diaristic, a retroactive nomination that is fitting. To stay on point, the urge to film with scant regard for state-controlled budgets or abiding to the tastes of theatrical distributors was the compulsion common to both Chakraborty and Joshi’s films: debut directors emerging as auteurs with their signatures. There is more to be said on the common ground of the two processes that mark a definite shift in this second new wave: a retreat from the auteur tradition established by those trained as directors at FTII and forging alliances with the cinematographers. The exalted place of the director, whose relationship to the craft of filmmaking was somewhat distant, greatly benefitted from cinematographers (K.K. Mahajan, Piyush Shah, Sashikanth Ananthachari, Anil Mehta, Rafey Mahmood, Ranjan Palit, and K.U. Mohanan—to name some of those who worked with these auteurs) translating the ‘auteur’s vision’ to the cinematographer. In no uncertain terms, the aura surrounding a director’s post-production barely acknowledges the extensive translation by cinematographers on set, from storyboarding to lighting the set, that gives shape to a director’s eye. The unacknowledged tribute of cinematographers, sound recordists, and editors, all of them trained at FTII alongside directors, that repeatedly recurs in art house cinemas receives its due in Eleven Miles . Smaller budgets were not the only common detail to these two films; they were both invested in the craft of ‘embodied filmmaking’ as Ananthachari names it. And here it is worth considering how close the two films, Eleven Miles and Kaal Abhirati, are in their preoccupation with their dispositif of the low-budget, 16mm camera and outside standard theatrical screenings, despite their distinct audiences. Amitabh Chakraborty had graduated as an editor whose theorization of craft and philosophy of cinema were intertwined; the collaboration with Ananthachari yielded a film whose contours were about cinema itself. Eleven Miles had Joshi collaborating with Ranjan Palit who was already known for shaping the style of documentary films, his keen attention to a humanist aesthetic would elevate the non-governmental organization and

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mainstream documentary films to possess an aesthetics, bestowing a style that to date remains unrivalled.95 Eleven Miles barely holds any features of a documentary, though it tends to be slotted in its circulation within those narrow confines; given the large berth that has long been accorded to non-fiction films, its cataloguing deserves specificity in future screenings. Watching Eleven Miles , now digitally restored, is to admire the gall of this film that insists on style that could be framed as being about the Bauls, yet defiantly sidestepping that instrumental brief by delving into the ontology of the filmmaker in quest of his subjects.

Bishar Blues That Bishar Blues moves out of the vast corpus of works on the Bauls fuels my reading. Written scholarship on the Bauls begins with their recognition by Tagore and his nurturing of them at Shantiniketan. Their esoteric rituals have the studious attention of religious studies scholars, for their simultaneous proximity to and distance from orthodox Hindu Vaishnava practices and scriptural Islam. Scholars and others would celebrate their syncretic habits: their music would be recorded and salvaged by musicologists, as well as having musicians jamming with them; ethnographers (Italians particularly) would produce numerous theses; and other fans would come flocking to Bengal, barging into their iterant lives; their singing would be memorialized for their ‘thinness’ of voice. A Baul archive honouring Edward Dimock’s pioneering work in American ethnomusicology dedicates itself to recording and preserving their musical virtuosity, instruments and singers, both men and women. Recent writings have been keenly aware of the Baul’s place in the marketplace of music. Sifting through the written literature in English and those available in translation, the focus on Baul music has carved a space of appreciation and inquiry distinct from the philosophical preoccupations and Bhakti overtones that have minstrels in ecstatic dispositions ideally or at least simulating rapture.96 Filmmakers too have been riveted by the performance of these singers and have elevated them to stardom. (Their presence as folk singers in Ritwik Ghatak’s films punctuates the narrative so as to resonate with the style of popular cinema that I have dubbed as ‘cinema of interruptions.’) Their ascendancy into the global music scenes would lead to existential

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crises, provoking despair and in some cases ending in suicides; unhappiness dogged many of them, despite their arrival on the world music scene with the likes of Bob Dylan and others. The essay form allows for a meandering expansiveness.97 Singing stardom emerges as the distinctive feature of the Bauls in this treatment, permanently severing considerations of philosophy and lived life, consigning these to the remit of anthropologists, and in several cases a tethering of practices exclusively in favour of singing Bauls. Despite the adoring celebration of the Bauls, Joshi’s film—as is equally the case in the extensive written scholarship on Bauls—erases the continuum between Bauls and Fakirs that has the latter suffering extinction. Without a fuss on its originality or forwarding an argument for its brief as expressed in an IFA grants fellowship announcement page, Bishar Blues breaks away from the empire of works on the Bauls to offer a ‘journey film’ that has Chakraborty offering us a ringside view of a most local geography of Islamic mystical practices in Bengal that eschews the sweep of Sufism as a monolithic practice. Bishar Blues is the sole survivor of Chakraborty’s corpus of documentary works, the others lost as indicated earlier in the caverns of bureaucracies and to rogue capitalism characterized by speculations, mergers, rampant erasures, and archives destructed. What a survivor it has turned out to be! It became a festival favourite with a world premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2006, followed by screenings at Munich Dokfest, 2007; Bilan Ethnographic Film Festival, Paris 2007; Alba International Film Festival, Italy 2007; the biennial Yamagata International Film Festival, Japan 2007; Nomadsland, Washington, D.C., 2008; and the Sardinia Ethnographic Film Festival, 2008. Closer to home, it screened at IFFI Goa and in Kolkata at Gorky Sadan, 2007. It won the 54th National Award (Golden Lotus) for the best film in the Nonfeature Section, best editing award for Chakraborty and his editing associate, Amit Debnath, and best sound award for Partha Pratim Barman.98 Bishar Blues ’ wide circulation at film festivals is the expected circuit and norm for documentary films, a clear measure of their success that accompanies awards as additional recognition. In this case, the awards capped the smoothest of production stories in Chakraborty’s oeuvre from the very beginning: a month-long shoot in the districts of Birbhum, Murshidabad, Nadia, and Burdwan in West Bengal, followed by a post-production

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grant from the IFA, and secured television rights from a European documentary channel that surfaces in the acknowledgements in the closing credits of the film. Goodwill from start to finish, accompanied by accolades and encomiums, is a novel experience for a filmmaker known for his cult classic, Kaal Abhirati, being a difficult film, and subsequently for a series of works damned by misfortune at the point of release and consigned to the black hole of archival mismanagement. These saturnine occurrences plaguing production and exhibition of the earlier works seem not to be the lot of Bishar Blues . The film was blessed in finding an audience practically on its own steam, its timing perfect at every turn, with none of the belatedness plaguing the other works. For the scholar too, engaged with lost and marginal works, Bishar Blues provokes the contrarian in me: How can one generate an attachment for a film that has won the hearts of so many, gained festival credo, and garnered so many awards? Rather than capitulate to a misanthropic worldview that assumes only orphaned and forgotten films have lasting power, the scholar’s own belated arrival meets the film’s embedded archaeology of local practices at the end of a long decade of upheavals in Indian civil society. An outstretched arm opens the film, bringing with it more of the body this time. Not in a state of slumber as in Kaal Abhirati but closer to the fraternity of passing the tall bottles of beer out from behind the camera towards Majumdar discoursing on the Bauls in Eleven Miles . To recall, shot on a raft of a boat rocking to low tide currents on the Ganges between Kolkata and Haldar, the recurring mise en scène of Majumdar pontificating punctuates Joshi’s film. Echoes of that form of plying recur here as well, in Bishar Blues , but with considerable difference that marks the distance between the two films: in contrast to the diaristic, Bishar Blues turns to philosophizing on the road. At regular intervals, from the third row in the back of a Sumo SUV in motion on the highway, the camera offers us a view at an angle that follows a line, from Amitabh Chakraborty’s back in the second row of the vehicle through to Liaquat Ali, in the passenger seat, whose pivoted stance inwards finds an audience for his exposition of Marfat. Whizzing on the highway from Birbaum to Burdwan, or further north, Liaquat Ali expounds on Marfat knowledge as that which is formless and unrecognizable and something that is in each of our bodies. He continues that variations of Marfat are wide and eschews singularity of thought,

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belief, and faith. Marfat knows that all forms are illusory and, for the practitioner, the continuous movement towards this knowledge is in itself not contained. At regular intervals, as the vehicle speeds on highways, stops at railway crossings or at roadside tea shops, the film allows Ali the full force of explanation—including an exposition of secret sexual practices that he launches into describing at a roadside tea shop in one section. Coming up right after a sequence introducing Suleiman Fakir, a vegetable seller at Saragachi Bazaar, the camera follows him cycling homewards at the end of the evening. With a cut, the camera settles on a still frontal shot of his wife and daughter who are lined up seated behind him, and records him narrating his steady conversion to Marfat under the guidance of Ruhul Fakir, a slow initiation into the practice of Marfat over a period roughly spanning four to seven years. The film shifts to Suleiman Fakir describing his full embrace of Marfat by cutting to a day shot of him under a tree seated beside a male companion, and on this occasion, he explains how his wife was also conscripted into the ways of Marfat sexual practices. Liaquat Ali’s earlier roadside exposition on how sexual desire opens the pathways to Marfat, a parsing that when tied to Suleiman Fakir’s direct address previously, allows us to assign the work of interpretation of these subaltern practices to him. We return to him again after a session with Lokman Fakir’s discourse on Marfat knowledge, predicated on reversing sexual energies, the recourse to metaphors of rivers flowing is in keeping with verses of Baul songs that scholars have identified.99 As the film resumes the journey on the highway with trucks speeding, Liaquat Ali’s exposition on Marfat offers a long history of migration that emerges from a co-mingling of Sufism from Persia with Tantric and Buddhist practices of Bengal, a verbal explanation that has the film tying shots taken from a camera located from the third row positioned inwards, with those of the passing landscape outwards. The cut to the journey’s final turn up a mud road with a tall singular tree in the near middleground, shot probably from inside the vehicle looking straight out, the film transitions to a scene with another Fakir. A continuity of theme ensues with the film recording in long take, Khejmat Fakir dancing to a song that the subtitles translate as extolling the language of heavens presided by Mohammed arriving in Bengal. A cartography of ideas travelling from Persia to Bengal flows through the next section, which has us meeting Mansoor Fakir, the keeper of his father; Azhar Fakir’s legacy ensconced at his mausoleum; and a humble

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single-room structure with a veranda—assorted shots offer coverage for the film. In his rendition of his father’s philosophy, Mansoor Fakir harks back to the legendary Lalon Fakir’s treatise on Marfat, a lineage from which he descends, and a philosophical inheritance that unites the two Bengals, both east and west, with the court in Meherpur (current Bangladesh), and presumably named after the sixteenth-century dervish Meher Ali Shah. The breakaway from orthodox practices, Mansoor Fakir insists, was his father Azhar’s initiative to remove the veil from women’s faces even if architecturally the women were separated from the men. From such prosaic narration of Marfat practices, the film cuts to a night performance that transitions from a shot of a moon to a scene of performance under a tree on a raised platform with a circle of chorus singers. Strumming the Ektara, a single-stringed instrument, and with a drum strapped across himself that he inherited from his father, Mansoor Fakir leads the singing and dancing, extolling the love between Allah and the Prophet as a primary lesson, a love that renders what is recognizably male and female. We have moved away from the directness of Liaquat Ali’s discourses on the body as the conduit for love, into a realm of indirectness and opacity that metaphors in verse embody, detectable only to the circle of followers, literally the chorus seated around Mansoor Fakir. Riddles enter the verse a little later when Mansoor Fakir poses the question: ‘In what kind of love will God love the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima, and call her Mother.’ The lengthy song (31 minutes in total, and approximately 5 minutes this point onscreen) carries Chakraborty’s editing finesse that splices two long takes, two sections of the song, and has us in the grip of continuity with Mansoor Fakir singing, swirling, drumming, and strumming through the night. The duration of the song has us swaying to it from night to day, pleats of time that the sequence sculpts for us. With little to guide us, neither Liaquat Ali or a voice-over, the film opens into a sequence that has Jalal Shah Fakir cycling beside a length of river spliced with a still wide shot of train tracks, beside the many-trunked canopy of a banyan tree sheltering a humble structure of a tent stretched over a rectangular low wall. The deeply researched film conveys to us via subtitles that this is the Mazhaar (Holy Tomb) of Pir Alam Baba, a Fakir in Birnbaum, West Bengal. This is the mise en scène for the cyclist Jalal Shah Fakir. In a series of subtractions and additions that has the tent appear and disappear, devotees crowd inside and out while Jalal Shah Fakir sings two songs after explaining that he aligns his paternal line to

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Datta Alam—the founder of a sanctuary in the forest surrounding these parts who was eventually buried at the tomb. For Jalal Shah Fakir, Pir Alam Baba’s call to turn away from the hierarchy of thirty-six designated castes manifests as a friendly play between the Prophet and Krishna in the verses of his song (Fig. 7.6). Following this section that transitions with Jalal Shah Fakir cycling across train tracks again, the film cuts to him seated in his room, with walls and ceilings bedecked with Fakir accoutrements, singing a lilting song to the strings of his dotara and a companion beating on the drum. The section ends with a kid goat blessed and festooned, seen initially roaming near the Mazhaar and finally caught loitering in the foreground of the closing still shot, while Jalal Shah is seated in his home in the far-ground. We lean in to fill in the blanks of this seemingly ordinary sequence that compresses the space between the tomb and the train tracks on a bike, folds day into night, and delivers a linear walkabout, giving the impression that this pet goat has accompanied Jalal Shah from the tomb to his home, but was markedly absent while on the bike. These tricks of absence and

Fig. 7.6 Fakir Jalal Shah cycling (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty)

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presence of the goat confuse our orientation, and plays with our comprehension of Jalal Shah Fakir’s geography as he covers the distance from home to Mazhaar, and by derivation elsewhere in his journey of renunciation of Marfat practice that he is embedded in. Equally at play is the status of the goat, uncertain as we are whether it is a pet or a future sacrifice for Id. Another night stop besides a tea shop near train tracks has Liaquat Ali return to the film with another take on how a practictioner knows Allah through the body. A path carved out, he says, in the earliest times of Islam during the Prophet’s conversation with the angel Jibreel. The film juxtaposes this intellectualization of offering the body in a direct relationship to the divine with the following segment suffused with ribaldry that the subtitle text indicates as the ‘death anniversary celebrations of Datha Baba Mehboob Shah.’ Beginning with the high-spirited provocative dancing of sari-clad transvestites at the Pather Chapri Fair, Birnbaum, West Bengal, an army band accompanies with shehnais blowing and drums beating to a raucous dancing that bears the fanfare of a processual offering through the gates of the darga. From a rooftop, a shot of the milling crowds impresses upon the viewer the heightened celebration of the event, which the film records from various angles. We arrive at a close-up of a self-avowed Brahmin widow talking straight to the camera, narrating her spiritual journey in the search of truth, which led her to the holy shrine of Pir Datha Baba outside the precincts of both temple and mosque, and through the teachings of Khuda Baksh’s son Khairul Saheb through her service to him. The language is coded in ways that reading her straight is the only way to parse the place of such devotion in the philosphy of an embodied practice. Subsequent long and wide shots capture the sights of the celebration: fields of pitched tents; a Ferris wheel in the fairground as the backdrop to the tall minarets of the Mazhaar; a nightly procession dancing to the repetitive beats of the army bands and crowds waving at the camera panning above; a group of Fakirs circling an elder who is offered the chillum clay pipe and massaged by two men close at hand after a deep inhale; Chand Bibi, a female singer, singing to the beat of cymbals in praise of Datha Baba; another singer playing his violin and accompanied by the cross-dresser dancer praising, the Kwaja’s benevolence overseeing the Chistya order; huddled men whose chillum passing registers a hierarchy that I learnt from Chakraborty years later; a devotee with long piercings with shout-outs to Pathar Chapri as the Kabba room Medina; and group portraits of onlookers, the initiated, and

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Fakirs. What we have here is nothing short of Metz’s descriptive segment that suggests spatial contiguity and a loosely tied temporal relationship, the length of days or a day suspended.100 We are offered a purview of a bustling fair whose composite figure emerges through fragmented setpieces. From that thickness of nocturnal celebrations, the film cuts to day scenes: a rice paddy in full splendour of green; shots of a boy listening to a popular Bengali love song on a handheld radio; the sound of a motor pumping water bridges us to a long shot of a woman with her back turned to us, combing her hair in a fallow field of laundry laid out to dry. What are we to make of these shots, strung together as a descriptive segment of life in rural Bengal? It is through these shots, familiar from feature films, that the film draws us into the secret of sequencing itself. We cut to a scene featuring another protagonist, Najrul Fakir who is clearly eliciting phatic responses from Chakraborty, whose off-screen presence is made evident by this form of the acousmêtre. As Najrul Fakir offers another rendition of the poetry of the Fakirs, such as himself expressing the divine—Allah, Ishwar, Adam—through the medium of the human body, the camera shifts its attention to a man, who we later see as the drummer accompanist, preparing a chillum, which is offered to Najrul Fakir who draws in a long-cupped inhale and hands it over to a person off-screen. This serves as a warm up to the singing, the strumming of the singlestring dotara, and the drumming. Najrul Fakir’s song keeps to his earlier sentiments of the body as medium and that Allah is only to be experienced through the body. The singing bridges scenes of the quotidian that pass through the backdrop, such as the work of a pesticide sprayer and a palm toddy tapper climbing the tall trunk. The scene of singing is in the midst of these daily activities in plain sight. ‘I’m like the bull who carries balls of sugar,’ the first song ends with Najrul Fakir holding forth on Lalon Fakir’s strident anti-caste ideology, and following up on that, his own philosophy that had him excommunicated for forsaking Shariat laws of daily namaz and other prescriptions. He insists it is when we shed these binding social identities that we are able to meet another human being. Najrul Fakir has a second tableau scene at night, this time with a woman singer, Jamila, whose full-throated voice offers a bluesy resonance that lends credence to the film’s title—Bishar Blues . The duet has us lilting to verses embracing the variations of Shariat to Sufism that include Tarikat, Hakikat, and Marfat, the vast and many mystical traditions of Sufism.

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After having run the course with men philosophizing, the film cuts to a night-singing performance of three women, one identified as Jamila with two other women singers with verses that lay claims on how this path converted their dead bodies, graveyard like, into gardens. With little prompting the camera wanders off from the stage to a back area of a makeshift open-air kitchen with large steaming vats. A cut takes us to women’s work: one at a loom, another rolling a beedi, and a young boy spinning thread with an older woman looking on. These are identifiable as a descriptive segment, indicating the work that women do, which we infer keeps afloat the Fakirs. Another conceptual transition segment starts with a flutist on a train, a Baul recognizable from his orange tunic playing a pleasant tune from a Rabindra Sangeet song that drowns out the rolling of the train wheels. The camera trained on rice paddy fields in full bloom conveys the speed of the moving train. When the film cuts, the flutist’s song is shortened, and we find ourselves turning down a red dirt road towards a bambooshaded shamiana (tent) where we meet Ghulam Fakir and Abed Fakir. This pair offers their version as followers of Marfat: Ghulam was thrown into jail and fined 501 rupees for not observing the schedule of roja (fasting) or the routine of namaz (prayer). Abed Fakir, by all accounts a subaltern, offers his mellifluous voice to sing verses that do not differentiate Hindu and Muslim gods. Shots of the setting with ducks in a pond, tender bamboo leaves, and resting cows cast a pastoral scene. This setting belies the antagonisms that a woman identified as Mahima describes to the camera; her husband was arrested for smoking marijuana along with Ghulam Fakir and were bailed out by the Baul–Fakir Association. Shots of a forlorn man seated beside a pond lead us to surmise that it is her husband who was the man cutting bamboo poles in the introductory shot. Mahima’s narration of arrests, ostracization, and excommunication by Shariat observing villagers brings to us the consequences of adhering to these Marfat practices. When the film cuts to an energized performance of a singer, we recognize the formerly forlorn figure as Mahima’s husband. Cymbals and vessels appear as accompaniments to the singing. The devotional song, attributed to the eighteenth-century Lalon Fakir riffs on the line: ‘Amar Ghor kahnnya ke biraj khore/I still don’t know who resides in my body.’ From the earlier exegesis in the film of Marfat philosophy, we hear these lines as forms of intimacy with the divine, singular ones and outside orthodox scriptures, a prototypical Sufi devotional offering that is distinctly Bengali.101

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At the end of this section, an episodic segment, we witness what we have not been privy to: Mahima and her husband in the privacy of their home. Here we see the gestures of love and worship of each other that as the diamond shape upward salute to the masculine energy of Purush Lingam and downward bow to the female energy Yoni, these are gestures and salutations in the gamut of the now familiar ‘namaste’ that yoga classes have translated as ‘I recognize the divine in you’ (Fig. 7.7). They kiss as the final gesture of their union, an iconography of the divine as a union of male and female principles. A cut has them sitting side by side in prayerful stillness, the call for morning namaz, Fajr, rings out on the soundtrack, which continues into the final shot of the film: an extreme long shot of a tree as a rickshaw-puller rides towards and beyond it. This composition with the call to namaz may read as a recapitulation

Fig. 7.7 Mahima and Fakir Abed (Production still, courtesy Amitabh Chakraborty)

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into Shariat order. Alternatively, borrowing from the book, Lonely Road, the rickshaw driver is the next Fakir of Marfat in search of a tree to pitch his platform. At times, it seems easy to understand Bishar Blues ’ popular reception in terms of a zeitgeist in documentary circuits that explored performances and practices from Islamic habitus, rural in their roots, and above all new to documentation despite the vast written scholarship. The world of independent Indian documentary has had an activist impulse from the Emergency onwards, with Anand Patwardhan’s Prisoners of Conscience (1978), and subsequently after catastrophic events such as the gas leak in Bhopal, Roop Kanwar’s sati (immolation), the rise of Hindu fundamentalism that had its ostentatious initiation with politician Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra (politico-religious rally), and the horrifying tearing down of the Babri Masjid.102 Jamia Millia Islamia, an institute for prospective documentary filmmakers, is one school of training that is easily detectable in the feminist collective, Media Storm, Raq’s Media Collective’s early work, Amar Kanwar, and many others in the independent documentary movement in India. From the site of film school training such as FTII, filmmakers trained to head into feature filmmaking also had as part of their training, 16mm documentary training. If there was a collective school style at FTII, it would have to be in the direction of a deep commitment to the language of cinema, as practiced by their teachers Kumar Shahini and Mani Kaul, that often has these films embracing experimental styles and abstraction. A review of these works reveals how redundant is the long-held difference between fiction and non-fiction films, a bifurcation worn thin yet persistent when we see feature films classified as popular, and state-funded Films Division films, the documentary. The changing aesthetic of world cinema in the late 1980s and into the 1990s not only put Iranian new wave cinemas on the map but also their practice of working on small budgets, shooting on location, and mining the differences between professional and non-professional actors. What is crucial in their difference from Italian neorealism is that these are films made in the age of film schools and the archive is not just the shooting of pro-filmic, but also the vast archive of cinemas globally. Given the many framings that one can bring to bear when watching Bishar Blues , it seems vital to acknowledge its popularity in the worlds of documentary audiences but also shake off that framing to see it as enacting cinema as thought experiments, a reading that slows us down.

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If Kaal Abhirati was an engagement with European cinemas and the spirituality of Kali, Bishar Blues takes its cues from convictions of turning to the mise en scène of rural Bengal as the place where the language of cinema will meet its greatest challenge from what to shoot, where to point the camera, what to record, and how to shape the duration of shots and offer sequencing. Cinema outings are not anathema in rural Bengal, but it is quite a feat to have the protagonists being recruited from that milieu. Such was the reception of Bishar Blues as it travelled through open-air screenings in the very places that the film was shot: Birnbaum, Burdwan, Murshidabad, and other venues in and around this cartography. Not unlike its reception globally that praised the film for its loving portrait of Fakirs—the ones who undertake a path of renunciation outside Shariat, ‘beshara’—and for an intimate engagement with their philosophy that includes singing, these screenings had an added response from the women in the community whose presence onscreen is quiet and fleeting; wives and devotees get a one-off chance to express their devotion through quiet support.103 The screening at Murshidabad was crucial. After the screening, Amitabh Chakraborty was pulled aside by wives and devotees of the Fakirs to insist that their stories were vastly different and also deserved a film of their own: ‘Won’t you show the ‘hidden truth?,’ they asked. Braiding these stories as they were narrated did produce a script, but not a documentary film of the kind Bishar Blues was fashioned. This would be out of the question given the task of recording sexual practices that by their own reckoning were private, between Fakir and his consort, and not available for representation onscreen, therefore outside the purview of cinema. This is how Cosmic Sex, a narrative feature I will examine next, came into being. When looking at Bishar Blues from the vantage point of Cosmic Sex, and up close, really close, the shape of fiction emerges at different registers: sequencing from one section to another, sequencing within one discrete section, and the sleight of hand at the end that hands over documentary to fiction wholesale. The singing from day to night, the transition shots and descriptive segments that rely on the iconography of the Fakir world set against trees and among rice fields, and the improbable arrival of the camera in the private precincts of the couple, excommunicated, and harangued by their neighbours, encases a language of a cinema that signals a fiction film.

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As we lean into the film, the carefully crafted editing—shaping time and space—emerges as the auteur’s signature, while the framing of documentary recedes.104 I propose that the work of sequencing in Bishar Blues is akin to what Rascaroli pronounces as ‘Notebook Film’ for those unfinished works that Pasolini embarked on. Bishar Blues sketches the terrain for Cosmic Sex, even if it turns out inadvertently to be the gift that the women offered Chakraborty at the end of one such screening at night and later on, in the conveyance of their divergent experiences.

Cosmic Sex (2012) My first viewing of Cosmic Sex was an overt commitment to the protocols of my research: view films and videos in the conditions chosen by the artists, filmmakers, and cinematographers. Ongoing conversations with filmmaker-artists sharpened my attunement to the philosophies of their practice, which they rarely commited to paper, thus compensating for the dearth of writing on films that has characterized Indian cinemas for decades. In November 2013, I had come to Kolkata to meet Amitabh Chakraborty and to see Cosmic Sex. I was riding the tailwind of the film’s reception that had been screened earlier that year at Osian’s Film Festival, New Delhi, in July, and had won an award for its actress, Rii. After a couple of other showings at film festivals, the producer, Putul Mahmood, and the director were continuing to explore their options in the theatrical circuits. It was during this lull that I landed at a scheduled viewing, sequestered at an editing studio. Little did I know that this form of viewing on a smaller screen, at times mobile, was how the film would be viewed subsequently by a large section of its audience (Fig. 7.8). When all the forms were signed and a certification of ‘Adults Only’ was obtained from the Board of Censors, theatrical distribution began in earnest in 2014, but the film already had an advance audience, allegedly through the handiwork of hackers (a rogue internet platform located off the grid in Bangladesh): Cosmic Sex had gone viral. Thanks to its ready availability on the internet, which generated revenue for the rogue website in the crores of rupees, the cost of theatrical distribution led to a significant loss of revenue for the filmmakers themselves. Yet, rather than bemoan the deficits, Chakraborty and Mahmood regaled me with stories of being ambushed, accosted, and simply greeted by strangers in public who had seen Cosmic Sex and exalted in the recognition of what are often seen as furtive practices, hitherto unrepresented onscreen. A devout

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Fig. 7.8 Amitabh Chakraborty on the set during a break at the Sadhana Badi location (Courtesy Putul Mahmood)

following was coming into being. What continues to blunt the film’s notoriety is a pared down version that is available as a result of agreed upon censorship recommendations, totalling thirty-three changes that lay in the direction of masking nudity, a solution available to filmmakers in the digital era. As I stepped onto the balcony off the editing room after the quiet intensity of viewing, I was still holding on to the image of Sadhana’s emergence from the river, after her ablutions, flanked by a herd of young bulls.

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Her slow saunter in a wet beige sari stayed with me: the luminescent glow of the morning light—a favourite of cinematographers—and the mood of pastoralism from painterly traditions writ large. That scene set me off in unruly directions towards popular culture: artist Hemen/Hemendernath Mazumdar’s paintings of women in wet saris; academy-style paintings from the 1920s of Hindu goddesses such as Lakshmi (widespread as facsimiles in calendar and poster art for their divine grace and benevolence ever since); and templates for full-blown song and dance sequences pitched as ‘wet-sari’ songs in Hindi cinema (from Raj Kapoor’s films, Satyam Shivam Sundaram [1978] and Ram Tere Ganga Maili [1985] to Ramgopal Varma’s rain song in Satya [1998]).105 In contrast to those singular portraitures of women in wet saris, a frontal shot of the pubescent Sadhana and a flip to the adult woman’s receding derrière in Cosmic Sex are far removed from that convention. This corrective had me sidling up to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (mid-1480s), which in turn derives its iconographic elements from Greek statuary: born from the foam of the ocean and kept afloat on sea shells as a full-grown woman, her attendant gods blow bugles to herald her emergence.106 Our glimpse of Sadhana’s emergence from the water was also not wholly indifferent to the portrayal of mermaids from European fairy tales, one iteration being Edvard Munch’s painting Mermaid (1896–97), and another more recent example being the Polish film, The Lure (2015).107 Imbued with references to amniotic fluids, mythological riverine births swirl on, from the Ganges in the Mahabharata to Moses in the Old Testament; rivers are blessed as conduits for the deliverance of divine creatures. First screenings are great mnemonic prompters to rearrange a film, yet highly overrated to continue to bear the burden as the key to the film upon returns to closer readings. In the age of online streaming across sites such as iTunes and the film’s own website, other rearrangements facilitated by fast forwarding and pausing functions hijacked me to further sections of the film; repeated close viewings and protracted engagement stripped me of endowing this scene with preeminent singularity. Stilling on an image in a film, after all, does disservice to it; and this feature film continues to bequeath me with a narrative rich in metaphors that move from sequence to sequence. The still image I was attached to after the initial viewing was paradoxically endowed with movement: Sadhana’s saunter among the bulls. Upon

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sustained viewing, it pulled me in yet further directions for its interpretation. As the tail end of a song and dance sequence, it borrows from such conventions that compress narrative time on the horizontal axis and allows for large leaps in plot time (a device I name as interruption in an earlier work). Discrete as a segment, it begins with pre-pubescent Sadhana sitting on a tree branch, intercutting with shots of young boys frolicking in the river, an orientation that produces the scene from her point of view, her giggles conveying an enjoyment of lasciviousness. A shout-out to her from an off-screen space is subsequently attributed to the voice of her guru, Ruhul Fakir. After repeatedly calling, the film offers us a glimpse of an outstretched arm from the darkness of the thatched home of the ashram, a space, we deduce, to be contiguous to the river bank. With a churlish countenance as a response to the admonishing tone of an adult, she slides off the tree branch—but not before noting blood stains, the onset of her menarche. From that point, the film shifts to a distention of time, first by showing Sadhana running towards the camera in slow motion, and later, when the sequence gathers force in a song set— a singing session under the lone tree on the bank at dusk; this appears to mark her maturation into womanhood. The words sung by the guru refer to Baul-Fakir lyrics of three rivers, coded language for the mixing of menstrual blood and semen that forms a river of desire, a texture of these songs. A still long shot depicts Sadhana dancing in the middle of the circle, shots of the guru singing, and towards the end of the song, with her back turned to us, we see her wading into the river after sunset; along the horizontal axis a herd of cattle swim left to right. A cut reveals an adult Sadhana, played by Rii, walking on the bank and keeping pace with calf bulls, who amble diagonally across the screen towards the ashram. Honing the convention of the song and dance sequence, which fits with yet another one of the categories of Metz’s grande syntagmatique, we behold an episodic segment: Sadhana’s development from puberty to womanhood in that space of the song on the banks where her ashram is located, the abode that she shares with her guru. We have the contours of this compression of time sketched in Bishar Blues that has Azhar Fakir singing the stretch of one song from night to morning. An eloquence in the flow of editing has the lyrics guiding one song, while compressing performances across different days and nights, in contiguous spaces, in effect, reworking the jump cut with a keen attention to the continuity of the song. Verse by verse, we follow without missing a beat, and lo and behold we hear one continuous song across different spaces and from

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night to morning. This continuity, as I have noted earlier, mounts fiction in a film avowedly sent into the world as an observational documentary. This segment in Cosmic Sex commits and departs from certain aspects of a song sequence in Bishar Blues . The shots do express contiguity between the ashram, the river bank, and the river to convey movement across large sections of time. Yet they are fragmented and set to the length of one song whose continuity on the soundtrack is a result of post-synch sound effects at best, a far remove from the rhythm of match on action editing in Bishar Blues . In lieu of the jump cut, we have entered what approximates an episodic segment that Metz defines as a linear unfolding entailing large ellipses of narrative time: Sadhana emerges as a woman. As much as ethnomusicologists have directed our attention to multiple and fluid meanings that riverine metaphors supply in Baul-Fakir philosophy—their secret, subterranean, sexual practices that embrace the union of female energy and male energy, Yoni and Purush, and their ultimate practice of reversing the flow of energy, observe an ethos whose presence onscreen in the language of cinema had not arrived before Cosmic Sex—Bishar Blues as the notebook film sketches the scenario and locations for the subsequent film shoot. Among the vast list of works on Baul-Fakir songs and practices, what becomes apparent is an a priori framing that has consigned these practices to the disciplinary modes of ethnography, ethnomusicology, and religious studies.108 These epistemologies, a marker of Indological discourse, have done great disservice to these philosophies, which enjoy only an elusive presence in academic discourse, otherwise dominated within academic departments by continental and analytical philosophical traditions. To take on the long-entrenched marginalization of these philosophies is a life-long task and relies on collaborations with other scholars.109 ‘Reverse the flow’ is a conceptualization that Chakraborty expounds on the film’s website, and which, when abided by this close reader, has me visiting the narrative flow of the film that veers and swerves in different directions. This sequence, outlining Sadhana’s maturity into womanhood, arrives in the film from an impossible position, from the protagonist Kripa’s point of view, whose sighting and stalking of Sadhana (because he sees in her an uncanny resemblance to his dead mother), has him swooning at her feet. A brief excursion to the film’s plot is in order. The film endows Kripa

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and his flight from his parents’ home after fearing that he had killed his father, as an excessive gesture reminiscent of broad gestures of the televisual style of Bengali middle cinema. Death seems a fitting narrative crisis since the father’s arrival on the scene occurs in their living room, where he witnesses a suggestive waltz between his son and his stepmother, far too close for him to rightly intervene. As with the attendant violence that entails the prohibition of incest from myth to secular laws, this incident is no different: Kripa is startled and hurls himself at his father who is knocked down, and the film spares no cliché by inserting a close-up of a framed photograph of Gandhi, close at hand. With the possibility of incest cut short, and the reassertion of paternal law despite the alleged death of the father, Kripa makes a hasty exit from his family home: self-imposed banishment has resonance in epics. In this run from home, the film places Kripa in a series of encounters, such as a chance meeting with a sex worker, Devi, who is tossed from a moving car on the side of the very road that he happens to be walking on. Another altercation at the brothel has him commit yet another crime, again an error in judgement, knocking down Jonaki, a jealous Hijra (transvestite) who rushes him while in the room with Devi. This time, the breakout from the brothel has Kripa running straight into a funeral procession, a perpendicular collision often favoured in road movies: head on collisions at T-junctions. Slipping into the charivari of the procession, Kripa is recognized by a fellow mourner from his wanderings about the ghats (cremation grounds), the place commandeered by Tantric practitioners made familiar to us from urban legends, ethnographic accounts, and textual traditions of Tantric philosophy.110 These shots are from within the forward motion of the procession in a tunnel shot, telescoping within the throng that allows us to see in the far-ground another procession heading in the opposite direction in the same road: a float of Kali. As if on cue, at the horror of being recognized, Kripa pirouettes to face us and joins the Kali procession by slipping out of the funeral train, a performance of reversion. With a cut, the film moves us out of the adventures of night to daybreak, which opens at the banks of the river Ganges where stone steps descend into the waters. The composition has Kripa’s back to us in the foreground and Kali’s revellers dancing at her immersion, marking the end of her Puja period, in the middle-ground, with the horizontal width of the river beyond in the frame, while the morning fog envelopes the cityscape on the other bank. As one float of the goddess slips into

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the water, Sadhana, emerges from the body of the river, the timing of a performance that is orchestrated to impress upon us the idea of coincidence. Keeping with conventions of point of view shots, the film effectively organizes the series for us to extrapolate that when Kripa mutters ‘Ma,’ it is the utterance as a moment of recognition for having spotted an uncanny resemblance to his dead mother. We are in the thrall of the film’s mining of the language of coincidences, and the film’s own condensation of these principles of editing that invites us to remember its use in the language of narrative cinema: protagonists criss-cross each other’s paths, their lines of vision somehow perfectly aligned so as to allow their eyes to seize on the object of interest—the beloved. In the many popular cinemas of India, this is often the moment of ‘love at first sight’ with little concern for the credibility of distance measured between the lovers (In Mani Ratnam’s Bombay [1995] in a large choreography of a wedding dance ritual, the lovers are locked in the convention of romantic exchanges of look; in Aradhana [1969], between the window of a moving train and a roving jeep on the road below, the protagonist spots his love interest, and the song confirms he has seen his dream girl). Kripa stalks Sadhana and the film switches out of that language of popular cinema to a scene reminiscent of Kaal Abhirati: the lovers’ labyrinthine walk-through through the lanes of north Kolkata in a long take. We have switched languages of cinema, rewinding into the modernist grids of Kaal Abhirati that plumbed the depths of disorientation, accomplished by deploying a cinematography of long takes with Kolkata’s winding alleys as willing accomplices (Fig. 7.9). I want to consider the long take embarked on here, cushioned between shots, which confounds our orientation to the space. We are reeled in with an opening still shot that has us watching Kripa stalking Sadhana, headed towards the bend of a street. With a cut, the camera accomplishes a long take that we recognize as a signature of Chakraborty’s collaboration with Ananthachari. This one, updated by cinematographer Rafey Mahmood, brings us closer to the walled homes that sit cheek by jowl in this section of the city. As the camera moves leftwards with an anamorphic distortion that concaves the narrow streets of this location, to warp Quattrocento arrangement of spaces that a straightforward rectangular frame would deliver, we see Sadhana walking towards us as the camera keeps on its leftwards slide. In the following close-up, we see the walls graffitied with Communist Party of India Marxist (CPI [M]) dictums as we near and pass various window shutters. Dipping into another lane, distinctly

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Fig. 7.9 Amitabh Chakraborty (Director) and Putul Mahmood (Producer) with Cinematographer Rafey Mahmood (Courtesy Putul Mahmood)

narrower, the camera shows Kripa walking towards us. As it backs out of that lane and moves leftwards at the corner, the camera swerves into another radial street where we spot Sadhana’s receding walk. My attempts to diagram the movement of the camera through the walls, streets and lanes results in drawing a horizontal street that allows for the camera’s leftwards movement, the track familiar in Kaal Abhirati. The two radial streets, squeezing the narrow lane where Kripa is stalking, have twirled in knots with blind-spots: Sadhana’s curved walk, a U-turn, up one street and down another has her slipping out of the frame, around the camera crew and out of Kripa’s sight, and turning down the next street. With the camera up close to the wall between the two streets, the anamorphic effect of rectangular architecture produces a curvature that is purely an in-camera effect that the lens delivers. When the camera pulls out by dipping in and out, a U-curve, it moves further leftwards to another lane where we spot Sadhana’s receding figure as it moves again leftwards to mark a similar CPI (M) graffiti. The long take functions as Ariadne’s thread and is subjected to further distortion through a lensing

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warp, the space that Chakraborty makes good on the alleyways as a multicursal maze. Together, they convey the impression of disorientation that is borne out of Kripa’s curiosity and stalking upon sighting an uncanny resemblance between a complete stranger and his dead mother. We are now caught up on the lead-up to Kripa’s swooning, on arrival at Sadhana’s home, and his explanation of her resemblance to his dead mother. Into the dark interiors of a house without electricity and lit only by a couple of kerosene lamps, Sadhana leads Kripa up a flight of stairs and into a room where he drops off into deep sleep. As the camera moves rightwards from his face to a close-up of ants on the floor, the film cuts to an upwards movement that has a pre-pubescent Sadhana perched on a tree branch. In the logic of causality of the plot, customary in feature films, this sequence is clearly anterior to the moment we have just seen; it is a flashback. Yet, the point of view is attributed squarely to Kripa, whose deep sleep allows us to consider this within the convention of dreams and this as an episodic segment. We have burrowed into an anterior space that is assigned to Kripa through the causality of shots, yet impossible in the time of the plot, and occupying a wide middle section of the film. What unfolds onscreen is Sadhana’s childhood and her passage to womanhood, her initiation to Marfat beliefs, particularly Dehatathya with her father/guru/teacher Fakir Ruhul, and scenes of his eventual death. These events exceed Kripa’s life span and invoke the film’s contract with twists of perception that Chakraborty expresses here as the logic of dreams. Cosmic Sex folds into Kaal Abhirati through tropes of the recumbent body with a difference: swooning and dreaming engulfs Cosmic Sex, drawing it closer to classical Surrealism. The canons of post-war cinema, Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) for instance, convey the incredulity of remembering by often delivering memories that the characters themselves would never have experienced: Leland recalls Kane’s first encounter with his second wife, Susan, for instance. Other films in the European canon of what we nominate as modernist works, La Jetée (1962) and Last Year at Mariendbad (1961) will extend the idea of duration to challenge our notions of a protagonistbased language of mainstream cinema: Deleuze’s ‘crystals of time’ that he will declare as time-image. Here, I detect a reworking of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) that is beholden to the maze of old city Vienna to mark its ascendancy as a canonical film noir. With an affection for the multicursal architectural maze of north Kolkata, this long take enacts the stalking that could have ended with Kripa’s arrival at

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Sadhana’s home, and opens further into another warping of a convention of dreams—it dislodges facile assignation of the dreamer to an exposition of anteriority.111 The act of stalking per se and chancing upon an uncanny resemblance entwines Buñuel and Hitchcock. Literally, by stalking Vertigo (1958) as the template, the film has me pirouetting towards That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) before being waylaid by Polanski’s Chinatown (1977). We are ensnared in the long game of cinephiles’ archives and unruliness that shifts film to film, and in a face-off with another player, the high stakes rise on a bait and switch. I am getting ahead of myself, but the slow reading of Cosmic Sex produces vertiginous effects that combine the walk-through of a multicursal maze in the mise en scène with themes of misrecognitions that propels a narrative punctuated by chance encounters. Kripa recognizes in Sadhana a resemblance to his mother, long dead. To be precise, Chakraborty casts the actress Rii to play both mother and Sadhana; in the language of popular cinema she is billed as playing a ‘double role.’ This conceit of misrecognition drives the narratives of both Vertigo and That Obscure Object of Desire; different women play the same role in the latter and Kim Novak plays a double role in the former. Impersonation has had a fair run in popular cinema with double roles for actors: Police Lockup (1993), Seeta aur Gita (1972) and most of all in Mani Kaul’s Duvidha (1973).112 We are in the familiar terrain of Marsha Kinder’s recent scholarship on Buñuel’s work that updates his films for ‘database cinema.’113 Dreams and non-linear narratives are the dominion of Buñuel’s films and these improbable points of view are well-honed by him as early as Un Chien Andalou (1929), the film that granted him the status of primogenitor of Surrealist cinema. Watching Cosmic Sex up close requires a cinephile’s capacity to conjure lines of contact between films, dreaming of cinema through the vast sea that is the archive of cinema, exponentially enlarged in the digital age. There are, nevertheless, overt homages and quotations in the film that belong to the vast audio track and in this film updated via radio and television. While sequestered in Sadhana’s tall dark house, Kripa is prompted to look through a window into another home across the street, clearly a nod to the peeping tom in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). As if on cue, the television news reveals Kripa’s father pleading for the safe return of his son and to reassure him that he is far from dead. Far from dead, Jonaki too is alive, announces the news anchor. On yet another evening after hard lessons from Sadhana on abdicating desire, and by not releasing himself

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to orgasm, Kripa is back at the window looking into a home across from Sadhana’s where an elder man, grandparental by all codes, is watching a song and dance programme on television. On his right is a pre-pubescent girl, presumably his granddaughter, mimicking the seductive moves of the song from a Bollywood film, Race (2008), called ‘Zara Zara, Touch Me’; this racy number is primed to play so as to coincide with Kripa’s arrival at the window. These and other moments of quotations in the film, with another a song from yet another film, Bobby (1973), are close to what André Breton called ‘objective chance.’ A surrealist practice demands a recognition that one forces accidents and collusions, to answer Freud’s provocative claim that there are no coincidences or accidents, everything is meaningful. Of course, in the film, the insertion of these songs on radio, or as fullyfledged quotations on television programmes emitting in the mise en scène, presents contrasts between the mores (and double standards) of the middle-class milieu, and the underground practices of Dehatathya, its obviousness apparent. That is precisely the point in the plucking of these song and dance sequences from popular films streaming on television; it is their ubiquity that Chakraborty is pointing at and deploying for precisely that ability, despite disguising them as found objects: Kripa chances upon that scenario. Here we are wading right into Joan Copjec’s exaltation of critic Leo Steinberg’s fine reading of Jasper Johns for choosing objects— wire hangers and flags—because he likes them just as they are.114 Behold Copjec enjoying the exchange between artist and critic: ‘But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way’ (32). Bull’seye! This answer hits its mark and Steinberg, recognising this, uses it to summarize Johns’ relation to his objects: ‘He so wills what occurs that what comes from without becomes indistinguishable from what he chooses.’

How can I not find resonances with Chakraborty’s choice in plucking and lining these found objects and interruptions that continuously blast out of homes, stream on television, or play on the radio in what is rightly to be seen as the acoustic ambience of Indian urban life. Coincidences and overlaps abound, making it impossible to discern which songs were playing in the pro-filmic during the shoot and which one was carefully chosen in post-production. This is a difference that both Johns and Chakraborty want us to see as being irrelevant, thus updating ‘objective chance’; found

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objects gain a second life in placement in a different sequence of image, and Chakraborty’s mischievousness and insight produces delirious effect for the cinephile in me.115 In Cosmic Sex, linearity strains at every register. While I, as the viewer, seem to have detected various embedded homages to post-war auteurs, the film radiates in various directions both in terms of acting style and cinematography: the opening section of the film at Kripa’s home adopts the style of Bengali popular cinema that FTII students, including Ranjan Palit, have derided as nothing but coquettishness (naka cinema); transvestite Jonaki’s acting and the scenes at the brothel employ the Jatrastyle broad gestures of Bengali theatre; the scenes at the ashram, in the hands of seasoned theatre actor Ruhul, bear the style of method acting preferred by radical theater practitioners inspired by Grotowski. Lighting heightens style as well: Sadhana’s urban home as the site of Kripa’s initiation into the secret cult of Dehatathya is close to an expressionist style of cinematography, with cast shadows and dark interiors. Rafey Mahmood arranged the lighting for the scenes of the ashram set on the banks aiming for a naturalism in style. These differing styles frustrate our orientation towards any one singular style; this happens most emphatically in Kripa’s dream that slips from noir lighting to the naturalism of the ashram. The closing sequence of the film, staged as a stand-off between Jonaki and her entourage on one side vying to pry away Kripa from Sadhana on the wide beaches of a river, ends twice: Jonaki’s histrionics depicting gestures of anguish for the accidental stabbing of Sadhana closes as a getaway familiar in popular cinema as a resolution that is enforced by law and order. In sharp contrast, the film’s ending, with Kripa and Sadhana heading down a river on a catamaran, sketches an ending that is as open as the sea that lies ahead. From stories of production, I know that this closing fight sequence was the first one in the film’s production, and the river bank Siryu in Birbaum District was the chosen location. In the finished film placed at the end, as Kripa pushes the catamaran into the water from the silted bank, we behold the full import of the incantation of Dehatathya with Sadhana leading the anointing with her bloodied wound, not menstrual this time, but a fitting bloody marking for a finale. Mounting Kripa she evokes chants of rivers, predicated on the Dehatathya philosophy of the flowing of energies of three holy rivers whose confluence is named Triveni. This philosophy, which she had discoursed to Kripa earlier in the house, she now returns to in telegraphic version: ‘Ira’ she utters, the name of a river going upstream,

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as she strokes him upwards from groin to crown of the head; she strokes him downwards to the utterance of ‘Pingala’—the downstream river that pulls masculine energy downwards; and ‘Sushamanna’—the final upward release—stands for final release from all desires. In long shot, we see her collapse beside Kripa. Again, we learn that Dehatathya and Baul songs are redolent with riverine metaphors as forms of secrecy echoing across a landscape interlaced by several rivers. These river tributaries flow into the Ganges, and finally on to the Ganges–Brahmaputra Delta that unites the two Bengals—partitioned into West and East under British colonial rule and later into West Bengal and Bangladesh. We know from Bishar Blues that Lalon Fakir’s birthplace is in contemporary Bangladesh, but that the Baul-Fakir practice and devotion flow across national boundaries. The film has exceeded its meaning, imagining a place before and beyond political partitions. But we are not done with the last segment just yet. Here we are in the space carved out by eco-cinema’s attention to the dispositif of the mise en scène. Rivers in this large delta meander, run off-course, form the oxbow lakes that Kolkata abounds in. These aquifers—suggesting the valency of underground rivers, undertows, underground cinema, and underground practices—coalesce to strengthen riverine metaphors with metonymic grounding. River banks emerge as locations of encounters and transformations throughout the film, most emphatically in Sadhana’s emergence from these rivers. Her end, that coincides with the film’s ending too, returns us to the river. As Kripa rows the catamaran to deliver Sadhana’s corpse out to sea, from his point of view, we see three bulls in the far distance accompanied on the soundtrack by the call to prayers at the mosque, the Zuhar/Duhr prayer. We are not far from the space of Shariat practice of daily prayers, but the image flings us in the direction of Marfat with all its taboos and underground practices. Upon a cut to another shot of Sadhana fading, the film closes on an upward shot that has a large herd of cattle wading through the river heading towards the catamaran. Multitudes have emerged from the couple we sighted earlier. We are entering a mythological space constructed by the film, a throwback to Sadhana’s own dipping in with cows and emergence from the river with a herd of bulls. To the rivers and bulls, she returns at the end, and this is where the film closes. We are in the space of art cinema, of the Indian kind, with evocations to deep philosophical traditions that cannot be contained within received disciplinary demarcations of religious

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studies and folklore. Here too, we can see the cows sauntering towards us, these are the cows that will deliver the dead to the other side, cows of Kamadhenu, cows of Bhakti followers of Krishna.116 At the same time, I cannot help but remember Hitchcock’s dismissive comment to Truffaut that ‘Actors are cattle,’ and his later retraction: ‘I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was that all actors should be treated as cattle.’117 Those lines play on a loop for me as I watch the last scene, the first sequence shot for the film. One can see Rii’s coquettishness in her hair style; her reputation brought her notoriety in Q’s (Qaushik Mukherjee’s) film Love in India (2009) and Gandu (2010). What to make of Rii’s difficult transformation into an art house actress through the film? What to make of the ‘mythos of cows,’ that has no direct link to Hitchcock, but seems Hitchcockian here? With Sadhana’s cyclical ending, the series of coincidences and accidents in the film collectively render that which cinema can convey, but not represent: reverse flow. Here is a cinema that rails against representation, taking no prisoners in its philosophy that image is borne out of elusiveness and for us to see the valency of the imaginal. In the shifting sands of the delta, in the space of a cut, we view in plain sight three bulls and in an indeterminate time in between, a large herd emerges. It is a minor moment if we focus on Sadhana and Kripa’s rowing outwards, yet an intimate viewing with the screen that the digital affords, reverse flow effects accentuated with touch screen commands, we see the possibilities of a cut. Not unlike the ways of Tarikat, the viewer experiences the shape of perception, of mysticism, that cinema as a conduit ably delivers. In contrast to the bombastic spectacles beckoning communities of viewers, audiences accustomed to the televisual generation of images, Cosmic Sex invites us to a moment slight enough to be overlooked, yet when one beholds what is possible between cuts, we sense an enchantment that can lift the darkness of the times we live in. Amitabh Chakraborty’s films are deeply transformative, challenging as they are of received categories of art cinema, documentary, and festival films. The experience of watching his films derails my own attempts to write about them, and they impress upon me the oneiric provocations implicit in writing. A cinema outside the scriptures of western art cinema, outside the circuits of film festivals, distant from Indian art cinemas too, demands yet that we risk everything we hold familiar as we approach it. To acquiesce to these films, scant in number and several lost altogether,

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is to experience the limitless ways of viewing and reading cinema, which span beyond film.118

Notes 1. For an indispensable account of Henri Langlois’ career as both institutional builder and cinephile, see Glenn Myrent and Georges P. Langlois, Henri Langlois: First Citizen of Cinema, trans. Lisa Nesselson (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995). 2. I am recalling Bazin’s geological references in: André Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,’ in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, ed./trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 3. For a fine collection of anthologies on Third Cinema, see Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, eds., Questions of Third Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 1989). Also see Wimal Dissanayake and Anthony Guneratne, eds., Third Cinema (London: Routledge, 2003). 4. The relationship between abstract expressionism and the Cold War has been best narrated in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 5. Filmmakers who would veer towards European-style art cinema had to endure in equal parts admiration and oblivion for long in academia. See, for example: Kathleen Collins, Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, and even early Terrence Malick. David Lynch, with his particular engagement with surrealism, deployed his tactics of subterfuge like no other. The belated reckoning of the work of L.A. Rebellion direly needs to be relocated within the ambit of global art cinemas. See Allyson Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 6. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, ‘Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema,’ in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, eds. Rosalind Galt, and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–27. A revisionist account of the ‘artiness’ of American art cinemas would have to account for the rising career of Kelly Reichardt alongside Malick’s prolific output that dwells on mythologies of America, including its exceptionalism. 7. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 2nd ed. (London: Taylor and Francis, 2014).

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Credit for pioneering work in Indian art cinema goes to John W. Hood, The Essential Mystery: The Major Filmmakers of Indian Art Cinema (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2000). Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, eds., Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). See also Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). David Martin-Jones, Deleuze and World Cinemas (London: Continuum, 2011). ———. ‘Introduction: Film-Philosophy and a World of Cinemas,’ Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 6–23. ———. Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History (London: Routledge, 2018). I want to acknowledge my multi-decade friendship with Harish Naraindas for these conversations on the geo-politics of knowledge. He has been unwavering in his scrutiny of the medical practices situated in the West that far exceeds any simple program of ‘returning the anthropological gaze.’ For a sample of his writings, see: Harish Naraindas, ‘A Sacramental Theory of Childbirth in India,’ in Childbirth Across Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin (Berlin: Springer, 2009), 95–106. ———. ‘Nospolitics, Epistemic Mangling and the Creolization of Contemporary Ayurveda,’ in Medical Pluralism and Homeopathy in India and Germany (1810–2010): A Comparison of Practices, ed. Martin Dinges (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014), 105–36. ———. ‘Of Sacraments, Sacramentals and Anthropology: Is Anthropological Explanation Sacramental?’ Anthropology & Medicine 24.3 (2017): 276–300. In a comparable direction for a framing of local practices of Buddhism in Thai cinema, see Arnika Fuhrmann, Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think? (London: Zed Books, 2015). Canan Balan, ‘Islam, Consciousness and Early Cinema: Said Nursî and the Cinema of God,’ Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 47–62.

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Laura U. Marks, ‘Real Images Flow: Mulla Sadrâ Meets FilmPhilosophy,’ Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 24–46. 15. To insist on commensurable philosophical traditions outside the western canon and which call on close readings of films, I can think of no better model than Joan Copjec’s intense and thick engagement with Abbas Kiarostami’s works that moves us out of festival adulation and towards Islamic mystical practices that are devoted to movement: Joan Copjec, ‘Cinema as Thought Experiment: On Movement and Movements,’ Differences 27.1 (2016): 143–75. ———. ‘The Imaginal World and Modern Oblivion: Kiarostami’s Zig-Zag,’ Filozofski Vestnik XXXVII.2 (2016): 21–58. The reference to conceptualization of the imaginal belongs to Henry Corbin. See Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Sh¯ı‘ite Iran, trans. Nancy Pearson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 16. Richard Eaton’s vast scholarship on Sufism and Bengal allows me to retain as my references the ecology of Bengal as nurturing flows and ebbs of ideas: Richard Maxwell Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ———. ‘Forest Clearing and the Growth of Islam in Bengal,’ in Islam in South Asia in Practice, Ed. Barbara D. Metcalf (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 375–89. Tony Stewart’s elegant reading of Bengal Tantric and Sufi tracts is my North Star of translating and interpreting texts whose beauty deserves a reception beyond Bengal: Tony K. Stewart, Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). For his expansive and keen attention to ecologies of the river Ganges and composite cultures, see Sudipta Sen, Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Also Sudipta Sen, ‘Betwixt Hindus and Muslims: The Many Lives of Zafar Khan, Ghazi of Tribeni,’ Asian Ethnology 76.2 (2017): 213–34. 17. Proficiency in Bengali would have provided a rich access to Ritwikkumar Ghatak’s writings. Alas, translations into English is all I have access to, and here is a short list of relevant publications for my purposes: Ritwikkumar Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences: Ritwik Ghatak on Cinema (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000). ——— et al., Face to Face: Conversations with the Master, 1962–1977 , ed. Sibaditya Dasgupta and Sandipan Bhattacharya, trans. Chilka Ghosh (Kolkata: Cine Central, 2003). ———. I Strode My Road: Montage of a Mind, trans. Sudipto Chakraborty (Kolkata: Monfakira, 2013).

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Josephine Joseph, ed., Ritwik Ghatak (Madras: Chennai Film Society, 1990). Such engagements with tradition were not exclusive to the culture of FTII, but were very much in the center of practices of artists and art schools from the anti-colonial period to post-colonial. For a fine evaluation of artists’ practices and the critical writing on these fraught matters, see Sonal Khullar, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). For a comprehensive account like no other of post-war European art cinema written within the orbit of both scholarship and practice away from Paris, see András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). For the continuing relevance of Deleuze despite his omissions, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomilson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). FTII students were undoubtedly taken up with Deleuze’s philosophizing of the image but from all counts not before the 1990s. I have been fortunate to be in an ongoing conversation with my colleague Syed Akbar Hyder on our dual commitments to close readings and undercutting the Euro-American stronghold on matter of poetics. For a taste of his fine work, see Syed Akbar Hyder, Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). My deep gratitude to John Nemec for generously offering his vast expertise on philosophical texts. Personal communication with Nilanjan Bhattacharya, June 2016 and December 2018. For a lively recount of the cineaste scene in Kolkata around coffee houses and film screenings, see writings by Mrinal Sen: Mrinal Sen and Subhash Nandy. Montage: Life, Politics, Cinema, Photographs by Subhash Nandy. London: Seagull Books, 2018. For an elegant reading of Sen’s film, see Kalpana Narayanan, ‘36 Chowringhee Lane,’ in The Cinema of India, ed. Lalitha Gopalan (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), 180–89. For an evaluation of Aparna Sen’s entire oeuvre, see Shoma A. Chatterji, Parama and Other Outsiders: The Cinema of Aparna Sen (Kolkata: Parumita Publishers, 2002). For the most comprehensive study of Rituparno Ghosh’s films, posthumously delivered, see Sangeeta Datta, Kaustav Bakshi, and Rohit K. Dasgupta, eds., Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender, and Art (New Delhi: Routledge, 2016).

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26. For a pioneering work that detailed state funding of new cinemas, see Mira Reym Binford, ‘Media Policy as a Catalyst to Creativity: The Role of Government in the Development of India’s New Cinema,’ PhD diss. (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1983). For an account of the nation-state’s culture of film production during this period, see Madhava M. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). 27. Chance viewing of works by student filmmakers from SRFTI has me pushing for sustained examination of these gems in a manner similar to my own multi-year research with FTII films. In the absence of multiple lifetimes, I hope other scholars will be encouraged to devote energies of this growing archive that has a rich roster of filmmakers from various corners of India, including a number of students from Tamil Nadu. Roopkala Kendro’s contribution to the culture of Bengali cinema is not clear. Of note, are a couple of alumni whose feature films since graduation demonstrates promise: Aditi Roy’s Aboshese (2011/12) and Pradipto Bhattacharya’s Bakita Byaktigoto (2013). 28. For a historian’s account of film societies, see Rochana Majumdar, ‘Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India,’ Modern Asian Studies 46.3 (May 2012): 731–67. 29. For a comprehensive account of film societies across India, see V.K. Cherian, India’s Film Society Movement: The Journey and Its Impact (New Delhi: Sage, 2017). 30. International film units have long been drawn to Kolkata in postindependence India. One of the oft-repeated origins of art cinema in Kolkata takes us to Jean Renoir’s arrival in 1949 to shoot The River (1951) and Satyajit Ray’s part as an assistant spurred his aspiration to become a filmmaker himself. A relay of visits from European directors soon followed: Nehru commissioned Roberto Rossellini to shoot India (1957) as a record of the first decade of independence. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s visit in 1961, recorded as a travelogue and in his notebook film on India, generated enough frisson to see the city of Kolkata as theatre. Louis Malle carves an entire film, Calcutta (1969), from his magnum opus, Phantom India (1969), after noting the extensive footage that he had amassed during his time in the city. My own favourite, Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975), allows the casting of the phantasmatic onto a city that far too often has been reduced to a mise en scène of poverty and exploitation. 31. Kumar Shahini’s writings on cinema and his practice have been available in English, including essays and an interview in Framework 30 (1986). To the great delight of scholars, the publication of a recent anthology recognizes Shahini as one of the most important theorist-filmmakers of the last twentieth century:

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Kumar Shahani and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Kumar Shahani: The Shock of Desire and Other Essays (New Delhi: Tulika Books in association with the Raza Foundation, 2015). Laleen Jayamanne’s evaluation of his oeuvre offers a great model of a fellow filmmaker’s engagement with Shahini’s practice, both films and writings: Laleen Jayamanne, The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). For Mani Kaul’s writings available in English, see Udayana V¯ajapey¯ı, Uncloven Space: Mani Kaul in Conversation with Udayan Vajpeyi, trans. Gurvinder Singh. (Hyderabad: Quiver, 2013). An essay on sound, see Mani Kaul, ‘The Rambling Figure,’ in Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures, 1998–2001, ed. Larry Sider, Diane Freeman and Jerry Sider (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 209–20. I would like to list some fine examples of emerging scholarship on Kaul’s work: Parag R. Amladi, ‘Naukar ke Kameez,’ in The Cinema of India, ed. Lalitha Gopalan (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), 246–56. Richard I. Suchenski, ‘Mythic and Modern: The Aesthetics of Space in the Films of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani,’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 25.1 (2017): 29–50. Colin Burnett, ‘Transnational Auteurism and the Cultural Dynamics of Influence: Mani Kaul’s ‘Non-Representational’ Cinema,’ Transnational Cinemas 4.1 (2013): 3–24. For an account of the political economy of state funding for cinema, see M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). There is a vast scholarship written in Bengali on this cinema that I cannot access given my own lack of proficiency. In addition to the books in English, I have relied extensively on oral narratives with filmmakers for alternative histories of this cinema. On this count, my conversations with Pinaki Banerjee have been indispensable and deeply informative. For a few books available in English, see: Kironmoy Raha, Bengali Cinema (Calcutta: Nandan, 1991). Sharmistha Gooptu, Bengali Cinema: ‘An Other Nation” (London: Routledge, 2011). All details of production are from my interviews with Amitabh Chakraborty, November 2014, December 2015, and August 2017. Interviews with Sashikant Ananthachari, 2019. Soudhamini had returned from working with Mani Kaul on Duvidha (1973) and was taken up with the wonders of the hand-crafted Bolex. Her twenty-two minute film Thalarndhadhu/It rested (1989)—translates as ‘loosened’ and—was edited by Amitabh Chakrabortty. During this period, Ramani was making his documentary Saa (1991).

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37. Writer Amit Chaudhuri has a similar story of return to Kolkata: Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). 38. Girish Kasarvalli’s Mane (1990) produced with Karnataka state funds was conceived similarly: 16mm blow up to academy ratio for exhibition. 39. Satyajit Ray’s dismissal of Kumar Shahini and Mani Kaul can still draw blood in the world of art cinema, carving lines between realism and its antonyms, including formalism. In return, an appreciation of Ray’s films among FTII filmmakers has been erratic, both praise and hesitation accompany their approaches. Satyajit Ray, ‘An Indian New Wave?’ Our Films, Their Films (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1976), 81–99, originally published as an article in 1971. In the realm of scholarship for a belated appreciation of Ray, well after Andrew Robinson’s magnum opus see: Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (London: Deutsch, 1989). Moinak Biswas, ed., Apu and After: Re-visiting Ray’s Cinema (London: Seagull Books, 2006). Keya Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 40. Dhruba Gupta, ‘Kaal Abhirati: Another (?) Cinema,’ Deep Focus III.1 (1990): 5–7. Rana Mitra, ‘Interview with Amitabh Chakraborty,’ Deep Focus III.1 (1990): 8–12. 41. See Soudhamini, ‘Film Review: Kaal Abhirati,’ Cinemaya: The Asian Film Magazine (Summer 1990): 30–31. 42. Such is the story of losses of 35mm prints that would return from international film festivals and be stored away in less than ideal conditions if they failed to win state awards in India. Suma Josson’s Janmadinam (1998) is an obvious example as indicated in my ‘Opening.’ 43. The vast holdings of the National Film Archives of India has had its own charismatic apparatchiks and for multiple generation of cinephiles, P.K. Nair exceeded the brief of this titular office to expand the holdings of the library often through ingenious methods of subterfuge. For a long overdue evaluation of his career, see Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s film Celluloid Man (2012). 44. Putul Mahmood also remembers a similar effect that she experienced viewing G. Aravindan’s Kanchana Sita (1978). 45. ‘Cinema of Prayoga,’ Experimenta India, 2001. Available at: http://exp erimenta.in/cinema-of-prayoga/ (Accessed July 2020). 46. Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, Cinema of Prayoga: Indian Experimental Film & Video, 1913–2006 (London: Nowhere, 2006).

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47. Amrit Gangar, ‘In Conversation with Amitabh Chakraborty,’ in Cinema of Prayoga: Indian Experimental Film and Video 1913–2006 (London: No.w.here, 2006), 57–62. 48. András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism European Art Cinema, 1950–1980. 49. In the blindness that strikes the most promiscuous of cinephiles, Nilanjan Bhattacharya reveals that he has to yet see Kaal Abhirati. Though he was aware of its cult status, he missed the initial screenings and his own interests moved decidedly towards independent documentary. 50. Amrit Gangar, ‘In Conversation with Amitabh Chakraborty,’ 59. 51. I am greatly indebted to Sonia Khurana’s video installation Logic of Birds (2006) for beckoning me to take to the floor in a corner of Kiran Nadar museum to experience her performance in a public square in Barcelona. Also of relevance here is my chancing on Marion’s head on the shower floor in Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) at the Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art, Washington, D.C. Video art installations have had us run us out of superannuated theatrical viewing habits. 52. Genevieve Warwick, ‘Memory’s Cut: Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid of 1608,’ Art History 40 (2017): 884–903; 900–01. 53. Genevieve Warwick, ‘Memory’s Cut,’ 900–01. 54. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 55. How can I not acknowledge Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 56. According to Amitabh Chakraborty these references to European masters are maternal, lessons from his mother who was a fine arts artist from Shantiniketan, the well-known Kala Bhavana established by Tagore in 1919. The placement of oranges from Cezanne’s paintings at the country bar, the homage to Giorgio de Chirico’s experiments with differing planes abound in Kaal Abhirati. 57. Amrit Gangar, ‘In Conversation with Amitabh Chakrabory,’ 62. 58. From Annette Michelson to P. Adams Sitney and towards Kauffman, scholars with archival work under their belt, identify details that are not discernible in video or reprints on 16mm university prints. For instance, at stake are ten discs whose movement that a contraption of a movie camera records. For a review of previous writings on the film, see Alexander Kauffman, ‘The Anemic Cinemas of Marcel Duchamp.’ The Art bulletin (New York, N.Y.) 99.1 (2017): 128–59. 59. For this geometry of action, I have been inspired by Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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60. There is a general sense of engaging with Ghatak’s preoccupations with archetypes, but in this film, it acquires an additional revision by refusing to grant the widow the status of a protagonist, a frontal shot. On Ghatak’s archetypes, see recent translations by Moinak Biswas: Ritwik Ghatak, ‘Human Society, Our Tradition, Filmmaking, and My Efforts,’ trans. Moinak Biswas. Cinema Journal 54.3 (2015): 13–17. 61. For a rigorous reading of Antonioni’s films, see Seymour Benjamin Chatman, Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 62. For a reading of stillness in experimental films, see Justin Remes, Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 63. For a connection between the cinematography of high angle shots and war technologies, see Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989). 64. For the most comprehensive collection of essays in art history and global modernisms that I have found useful in this engagement with art cinema, see Elaine O’Brien, et al., Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). 65. For an evaluation of Badal Sircar’s theater, see Rustom Bharucha, Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theater of Bengal (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983). 66. Gina Marchetti, Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018). 67. Annette Michelson, ‘Eisenstein at 100: Recent Reception and Coming Attractions,’ October 88 (1999): 69–85. 68. For a fine critique and for its poetics, see Harish Naraindas, ‘Of Sacraments, Sacramentals and Anthropology: Is Anthropological Explanation Sacramental?’ 69. I am borrowing and recalling Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Mythopoetic Cinema: On the Ruins of European Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 70. For a recent book length account of The Hungryalists, see Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury, The Hungryalists: The Poets Who Sparked a Revolution (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India, 2018). 71. Coffee House cultures in Kolkata, Delhi, and Ahmedabad have finally been memorialized in Bhaswati Bhattacharya’s engaging book that combines paper studies for a historical view and oral interviews with luminaries and hangers-on at the chain Indian Coffee House: (ICH). Bhaswati Bhattacharya, Much Ado Over Coffee: Indian Coffee House Then and Now (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2017).

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72. For an evaluation of City Lights Bookstore in the fostering of international avant-garde movements, see Gioia Woods, ‘‘Reinvent America and the World’: How Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books Cultivated an International Literature of Dissent,’ European Journal of American Studies 12.2 (2017): 46. 73. In addition to these folk practices, the film on the painter Hiran Mitra speaks to Amitabh’s deep and long interests in the history of painting; that his mother was a student of Santhiniketan’s fine arts tradition made the world of painting familiar and explains the homages across Kaal Abhirati: De Chirico’s paintings as the inspiration for the colour palette of the film and a simulation of Cezanne’s oranges on the table at the local bar. 74. According to Sashikanth Anathachari, it is worth pointing out that in other states, Tamil Nadu for instance, rather than distributing it between several filmmakers, the local state government succumbed to lobbying by senior filmmakers who hoarded these spare funds towards larger projects for themselves; Balu Mahendra was one of directors who monopolised these funds. 75. The performance arts that were recorded included Ravan Chaya (folk shadow puppeteers performing Ramayana), Jagaghar (an ancient martial arts), and Gutipua dance school from which Odissi originated. Rank neglect and scant regard for archiving are apparent in the age of digitization. A not so dissimilar move plagues funding agencies whose call for applications includes solicitations of portfolios from artist footnotes. For instance, a transferred and supervised copy by Ananthachari of Kaal Abrirathi was submitted to the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) for securing funds for the post-production of Bishar Blues in the early 2000s. That digitized copy was never archived since such was not the protocol and destroyed after funding was dispersed—the diktat of these non-governmental agencies who are the new denizens of independent film productions. 76. In addition to subaltern historians works, I want to identify an exemplary attention to writing in the absence of archives: Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts,’ Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 12.2 (2008): 1–14. 77. Ruchir Joshi, ‘The Hiss and Scratch of Time,’ Marg: A Magazine of the Arts (September–December 2018): 50–55. 78. Paul Arthur, ‘Essay Films,’ Film Comment xxxix.1 (2003): 58–63. Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film from Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2009). 79. Paul Arthur, ‘Essay Films,’ 58.

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80. Bill Nichols, ‘Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,’ Critical Inquiry 27 (Summer 2001): 580–610. It is worth noting that Nichols’ essay was published before Documenta 11, and after A Season Outside, and perhaps because of its disciplinary preoccupations and geographical provincialism, it may not have circulated in the orbit sketched by Enzewor and Kapur. 81. Bill Nichols, ‘Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,’ 603. 82. Okwui Enwezor, ‘Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights and the Figure of ‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art,’Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art: Art & Ethics 5.1 (2004): 11–42. Geeta Kapur, ‘A Cultural Conjuncture in India: Art into Documentary,’ in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaniety, eds. Terry Smith, Okwui Enzewor, Nancy Condee (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 30–59. 83. Please note that Bill Nichols dates it as 1947, but the date on The Alicat Book Shop Press is 1946. Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film (Yonkers: The Alicat Book Shop Press, 1946). 84. Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). Catherine Russell, ‘Ecstatic Ethnography: Maya Deren and the Filming of Possession Rituals,’ in Rites of Realism: Essay on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 270–93. 85. The writing that is most pertinent here is Jean Rouch, ‘On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer,’ trans. Steve Feld and Shari Robertson. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 5 (1978): 2–8. For a collection of Jean Rouch’s writings, see Ciné-Ethnography, trans. Steve Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 86. Lingering in the background of both Nichols and Russell’s formulations on documentary and ethnography films stands P. Adams Sitney’s tome, The Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde that deploys the ‘Trance Film’ to place Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) as an early trance film. Sitney forges an archive and devotes readings to films, which would help canonize the American avant-garde, more often than not at considerable difference from ethnographic filmmaking and art cinemas. See P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For the continuing interest in trance and new media, see the anthology: Heike Behrend, Anja Dreschke, and Martin Zillinger, eds., Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

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87. Catherine Russell, ‘Ecstatic Ethnography,’ 293. 88. I am evoking Bill Nichols’ careful theorization of voice overs in documentary: Bill Nichols, ‘The Voice of Documentary,’ Film Quarterly 36.3 (1983): 17–17. 89. Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker. 90. Again and again, Roberto Tejada emerges as my favourite interlocutor. Recalling that Malinowski’s diaries discovered posthumously and packed with less than admiring comments on the Trobriand Islanders did cast a pall of doubt on the distance assumed by ethnographers seeking participant-observation, or at least the sincerity of their avowed affection. See Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (London: Routledge, 2004). 91. Rascaroli, The Personal Camera, 146. 92. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 93. For a reading of the political role of the acousmêtre in the context of Francoist cinema, see Alejandro Yarza, The Making and Unmaking of Francois Kitsch Cinema: From Raza to Pan’s Labyrinth, 167–74 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). 94. Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 57. 95. I have discussed Ranjan Palit’s contribution to independent documentary in ‘End of an Argument: Sanjay Kak’s Jashn-e-Azadi,’ Screen Annual Conference, June 2012. 96. For a short bibliography in English, I find the following tracts useful: Charles Capwell, ‘The Esoteric Belief of the Bauls of Bengal,’ The Journal of Asian Studies (pre-1986) 33.2 (1974): 255–64. Charles Capwell, The Music of the Bauls of Bengal (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1986). Rahul Das, ‘Problematic Aspects of the Sexual Rituals of the Bauls of Bengal,’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 112.3 (1992): 388– 432. Edward Dimock, ‘Rabindranath Tagore—‘The Greatest of the Bauls of Bengal.’’ The Journal of Asian Studies 19.1 (1959): 33–51. Fabrizio M Ferrari, ‘Mystic Rites for Permanent Class Conflict: The Bauls of Bengal, Revolutionary Ideology and Post-Capitalism,’ South Asia Research 32.1 (2012): 21–38. Kristin Hanssen, ‘Ingesting Menstrual Blood: Notions of Health and Bodily Fluids in Bengal,’ Ethnology 41.4 (2002): 365–79. ———. Women, Religion, and the Body in South Asia: Living with Bengali Bauls. (London: Routledge, 2018).

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97.

98.

99.

100. 101.

Lisa Knight, ‘B¯auls in Conversation: Cultivating Oppositional Ideology,’ International Journal of Hindu Studies 14.1 (2010): 71–120. Josef Kuckertz, ‘Origin and Construction of the Melodies in Baul Songs of Bengal,’ Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 7 (1975): 85–91. Carola Erika Lorea, ‘Playing the Football of Love on the Field of the Body: The Contemporary Repertoire of Baul Songs,’ Religion and the Arts 77 (2013): 416–51. ———. ‘Searching for the Divine, Handling Mobile Phones: Contemporary Lyrics of Baul Songs and Their Osmotic Response to Globalisation,’ History and Sociology of South Asia 8.1 (2014): 59–88. ———. Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman: A Journey Between Performance and the Politics of Cultural Representation (Leiden: Brill, 2016). ———. ‘‘How Many Know How to (make) Love?’ Semantic Understanding of Bengali B¯aul Songs and Politics of Power in the Lineage of Bhaba Pagla,’ International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies 21 (2017): 86–116. ———. ‘‘I Am Afraid of Telling You This, Lest You’d Be Scared Shitless!’: The Myth of Secrecy and the Study of the Esoteric Traditions of Bengal,’ Religions 9.6 (2018): 172. Manjita Mukharji, ‘Metaphors of Sport in Baul Songs: Towards an Alternate Definition of Sports,’ The International Journal of the History of Sport: South Asia 26.12 (2009): 1874–88. Jeanne Openshaw, Seeking B¯ auls of Bengal (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Masahiko Togawa, ‘Syncretism Revisited: Hindus and Muslims Over a Saintly Cult in Bengal,’ Numen 55.1 (2008): 27–43. An off-shoot of such films has the cinematographer and filmmaker Ranjan Palit also making a film on the blind singer, Kanhai, commissioned by Bhaskar Ghosh for Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT). In solidarity with filmmakers fighting against the Hindu right-wingdominated BJP government’s attempts to dismantle the national film school, FTII, Amitabh Chakraborty returned the National Award. Note the dates. I have found the following scholarship useful on the Baul-Fakir continuum: Sudh¯ıra Cakrabart¯ı, Along Deep Lonely Alleys: Baul-Fakir-Dervish of Bengal, trans. Utpal K. Banerjee (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2017). Christian Metz, Language and Cinema, trans. Donna Jean UmikerSebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1974). The pioneering work on Sufi music in English that continues to be a standard bearer is Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, Sufi Music of India and

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102.

103.

104.

105.

106. 107. 108. 109.

110.

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Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For a summary of independent documentary films, see K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro, A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India (New Delhi, India: Sage, 2016). In Hindi popular cinema, fakirs are not uncommon and for long have been associated with the singing of Qawaalis. Thanks to Syed Akbar Hyder for reminding me of these sequences in Junoon (1978), Pakeezah (1972), Fiza (2000) Mandi (1983) and Garam Hawa (1973) as prominent examples. On narratives of post-production, Putul Mahmood recalls Chakraborty editing over eighty hours of rushes in early years of digital postproduction where the routine was to rent limited studio hours; lengthy schedules of editing is anathema to the quick paced time slots. Always marked and embedded in sequences drenched in double entendres of sexual desire that often had the ire of the Board of Censors for risqué connotations, wet sari scenes, nevertheless, spilled into advertisements like the Liril soap advert with Preeti Zinta. Thanks to Bogdan Perzynski ´ for offering this detail regarding European painting. Thanks to Mieke Bal for this reference to Edvard Munch’s painting. I want to acknowledge my conversations with Harish Naraindas on the geo-politics of knowledge. For this project, I have been most fortunate to have expansive access to Syed Akbar Hyder’s published works and his encyclopedic knowledge of Urdu poetry and poetics. In a different path across the university, Azfar Moin’s rich scholarship of the Mughal world provides a model of detail and depth; the reading of sainthood, though geographically distant from Bengal, has enriched my understanding of the possibilities of the Mughal world that were cauterized by British colonial presence. See A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). I have been energized by Faisal Devji’s elegant reading of the dominance of political Islam as the only option for the news cycle and scholarship. See Fasial Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). My earliest encounter with English scholarship on Tantrics in Benares was the following text: Jonathan Parry, ‘Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic,’ in Death and the Regeneration of Life, ed. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 74–110. For this lifeline and many other references, I thank Alejandro Yarza, for leading me to a giddy reading of the maze:

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112. 113.

114.

115.

116. 117.

118.

Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). I deal with the idea of double role in my essay: Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,’ Screen xxxviii.1 (1997): 42–59. Marsha Kinder, ‘Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel’s Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative,’ Film Quarterly 55.4 (2002): 2–15. Thanks to Roberto Tejada for this amazing lead to Copjec: Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002). Of course, with the precision of algorithm in Christian Marclay’s 24 Hour Clock, the vast archive converts into a database narrative, and the film is plucked, lined, and straightened out with a singular purpose to render the story of cinema in twenty-four hours, every second accounted for in world cinema. That breathless twenty-four hours art work devoted to linear time is the extreme version of linearity. For a fine reading of poster images of cows, see Kajri Jain, ‘Partition as Partage,’ Third Text 31.2–3 (2017): 187–203. Ghatak too had similar references to actors and his relationship to them: ‘To me actors are mere robots.’ See Ritwik Ghatak, ‘Filmmakers Will Have to Come Down to the Streets,’ in Ritwik Ghatak, Face to Face: Conversations with the Master, 1962–1977 , ed. Sibaditya Dasgupta and Sandipan Bhattacharya, trans. Chilka Ghosh (Kolkata: Cine Central, 2003), 38–46. I want to acknowledge and evoke my debt to Catherine Malabou’s The Ontology of the Accident. Parsing the concept of metamorphosis as far from fluid, Malabou demands that we think of the accident as severing all previous being. Here, metaphors of rivers abound in her prose as well. The chosen quotes from Spinoza that she relies on and the flow of desires from Freud places them collectively as companionate texts to Amitabh Chakraborty’s films, this one in particular. See Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012).

Bibliography Amladi, Parag R. ‘Naukar ke Kameez.’ In The Cinema of India, edited by Lalitha Gopalan, 246–56. London: Wallflower, 2009. Arthur, Paul. ‘Essay Films.’ Film Comment xxxix.1 (2003): 58–63. Balan, Canan. ‘Islam, Consciousness and Early Cinema: Said Nursî and the Cinema of God.’ Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 47–62.

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Bazin, Andre. ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.’ In What Is Cinema? Volume 1, edited and translated by Hugh Gray, 23–40. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Behrend, Heike, Anja Dreschke, and Martin Zillinger, eds. Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Bharucha, Rustom. Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theater of Bengal. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983. Bhattacharya, Bhaswati. Much Ado Over Coffee: Indian Coffee House Then and Now. New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2017. Binford, Reym. ‘Media Policy as a Catalyst to Creativity: The Role of Government in the Development of India’s New Cinema.’ Ph.D. diss. University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1983. Biswas, Moinak, ed. Apu and After: Re-visiting Ray’s Cinema. London: Seagull Books, 2006. Burnett, Colin. ‘Transnational Auteurism and the Cultural Dynamics of Influence: Mani Kaul’s “Non-Representational” Cinema.’ Transnational Cinemas 4.1 (2013): 3–24. Butler, Brad, and Karen Mirza, eds. Cinema of Prayoga: Indian Experimental Film & Video, 1913–2006. London: Nowhere, 2006. Cakrabart¯ı, Sudh¯ıra, and Utpal K. Banerjee. Along Deep Lonely Alleys: Baul-FakirDervish of Bengal. Translated by Utpal K. Banerjee. New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2017. Capwell, Charles. ‘The Esoteric Belief of the Bauls of Bengal.’ The Journal of Asian Studies 33.2 (1974): 255–264. ———. The Music of the Bauls of Bengal. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1986. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Chatterji, Shoma A. Parama and Other Outsiders: The Cinema of Aparna Sen. Kolkata: Parumita Publishers, 2002. Chaudhuri, Amit. Calcutta: Two Years in the City. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Cherian, V.K. India’s Film Society Movement: The Journey and Its Impact. New Delhi: Sage, 2017. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Translated Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Chowdhury, Maitreyee Bhattacharjee. The Hungryalists: The Poets Who Sparked a Revolution. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2018.

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‘Cinema of Prayoga.’ Program notes. Experimenta India, 2001. http://experi menta.in/cinema-of-prayoga/ (Accessed July 2020). Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002. ———. ‘Cinema as Thought Experiment: On Movement and Movements.’ Differences 27.1 (2016): 143–75. ———. ‘The Imaginal World and Modern Oblivion: Kiarostami’s Zig-Zag.’ Filozofski Vestnik XXXVII.2 (2016): 21–58. Corbin, Henry. Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Sh¯ı‘ite Iran. Translated by Nancy Pearson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film from Montaigne, After Marker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Dabashi, Hamid. Can Non-Europeans Think? London: Zed Books, 2015. Das, Rahul. ‘Problematic Aspects of the Sexual Rituals of the Bauls of Bengal.’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 112.3 (1992): 388–432. Datta, Sangeeta, Kaustav Bakshi, and Rohit K. Dasgupta, eds. Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender, and Art. New Delhi: Routledge, 2016. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Translated by Hugh Tomilson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Deren, Maya. An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film. Yonkers: The Alicat Book Shop Press, 1946. Devji, Fasial. Landscapes of the Jihad Militancy, Morality, Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Dimock, Edward. ‘Rabindranath Tagore—“The Greatest of the Bauls of Bengal.”’ The Journal of Asian Studies 19.1 (1959): 33–51. Dissanayake, Wimal, and Anthony Guneratne. Third Cinema. London: Routledge, 2003. Eaton, Richard Maxwell. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. ———. ‘Forest Clearing and the Growth of Islam in Bengal.’ In Islam in South Asia in Practice, edited by Barbara D. Metcalf, 375–89. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Egoyan, Atom, and Ian Balfour, eds. Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Enwezor, Okwui. ‘Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art.’ Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art: Art & Ethics 5.1 (2004): 11–42.

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Ferrari, Fabrizio M. ‘Mystic Rites for Permanent Class Conflict: The Bauls of Bengal, Revolutionary Ideology and Post-Capitalism.’ South Asia Research 32.1 (2012): 21–38. Field, Allyson, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart. L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Fuhrmann, Arnika. Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Galt, Rosalind, and Karl Schoonover, ‘Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema.’ In Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, edited by Rosalind Galt, and Karl Schoonover, 3–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gangar, Amrit. ‘In Conversation with Amitabh Chakraborty.’ In Cinema of Prayoga: Indian Experimental Film and Video 1913–2006, edited by Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, 57–62. London: Nowhere, 2006. Ganguly, Keya. Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Ghatak, Ritwikkumar. Rows and Rows of Fences: Ritwik Ghatak on Cinema. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000. ——— et al. Face to Face: Conversations with the Master, 1962–1977 , edited by Sibaditya Dasgupta and Sandipan Bhattacharya. Translated by Chilka Ghosh. Kolkata: Cine Central, 2003. ———. I Strode My Road: Montage of a Mind. Translated by Sudipto Chakraborty. Kolkata: Monfakira, 2013. ———. ‘Human Society, Our Tradition, Filmmaking, and My Efforts.’ Translated by Moinak Biswas. Cinema Journal 54.3 (2015): 13–17. Gooptu, Sharmistha. Bengali Cinema: ‘An Other Nation.” London: Routledge, 2011. Gopalan, Lalitha. ‘Avenging Women in Indian Cinema.’ Screen 38.1 (1997): 42–59. Guilbaut, Serge. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Gupta, Dhruba. ‘“Kaal Abirati”: Another (?) Cinema.’ Deep Focus III.1 (1990): 5–7. Hanssen, Kristin. ‘Ingesting Menstrual Blood: Notions of Health and Bodily Fluids in Bengal.’ Ethnology 41.4 (2002): 365–79. ———. Women, Religion, and the Body in South Asia: Living with Bengali Bauls. London: Routledge, 2018). Hartman, Saidiya. ‘Venus in Two Acts.’ Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 12.2 (2008): 1–14.

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Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Hood, John W. The Essential Mystery: The Major Filmmakers of Indian Art Cinema. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2000. Hyder, Syed Akbar. Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Jain, Kajri. ‘Partition as Partage.’ Third Text 31.2–3 (2017): 187–203. Jayamanne, Laleen. The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Jayasankar, K.P., and Anjali Monteiro. A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India. New Delhi: Thousand Oaks, 2016. Joseph, Josephine, ed. Ritwik Ghatak. Madras: Chennai Film Society, 1990. Joshi, Ruchir. ‘The Hiss and Scratch of Time.’ Marg: A Magazine of the Arts (September–December 2018): 50–55. Kapur, Geeta. ‘A Cultural Conjuncture in India: Art into Documentary.’ In Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaniety, edited by Terry Smith, Okwui Enzewor, and Nancy Condee, 30–59. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Kaul, Mani. ‘The Rambling Figure.’ In Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures, 1998–2001, edited by Larry Sider, Diane Freeman and Jerry Sider, 209–20. London: Wallflower, 2003. Khullar, Sonal. Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Knight, Lisa. ‘B¯auls in Conversation: Cultivating Oppositional Ideology.’ International Journal of Hindu Studies 14.1 (2010): 71–120. Kovács, András Bálint. Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Kuckertz, Josef. ‘Origin and Construction of the Melodies in Baul Songs of Bengal.’ Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 7 (1975): 85–91. Lorea, Carola Erika. ‘Playing the Football of Love on the Field of the Body: The Contemporary Repertoire of Baul Songs.’ Religion and the Arts 77 (2013): 416–51. ———. ‘Searching for the Divine, Handling Mobile Phones: Contemporary Lyrics of Baul Songs and Their Osmotic Response to Globalisation.’ History and Sociology of South Asia 8.1 (2014): 59–88. ———. Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman: A Journey Between Performance and the Politics of Cultural Representation. Leiden: Brill, 2016. ———. ‘“How Many Know How to (Make) Love?” Semantic Understanding of Bengali B¯aul Songs and Politics of Power in the Lineage of Bhaba Pagla.’ International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies 21 (2017): 81–116.

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———. ‘“I Am Afraid of Telling You This, Lest You’d Be Scared Shitless!”: The Myth of Secrecy and the Study of the Esoteric Traditions of Bengal.’ Religions 9.6 (2018): 172. Majumdar, Rochana. ‘Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India.’ Modern Asian Studies 46.3 (May 2012): 731–67. Malabou, Catherine. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012. Malinowski, Bronislaw. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. London: Routledge, 2004. Marchetti, Gina. Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ———. ‘Real Images Flow: Mulla Sadrâ Meets Film-Philosophy.’ Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 24–46. Martin-Jones, David. Deleuze and World Cinemas. London: Continuum, 2011. ———. ‘Introduction: Film-Philosophy and a World of Cinemas.’ Film-Philosophy xx.1 (2016): 6–23. ———. Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History. London: Routledge, 2019. Metz, Christian. Language and Cinema. Translated by Donna Jean UmikerSebeok. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Michelson, Annette. ‘Eisenstein at 100: Recent Reception and Coming Attractions.’ October 88 (1999): 69–85. Mitra, Rana. ‘Interview with Amitabh Chakraborty.’ Deep Focus III.1 (1990): 8–12. Moin, A. Azfar. The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Mukharji, Manjita. ‘Metaphors of Sport in Baul Songs: Towards an Alternate Definition of Sports.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport: South Asia 26.12 (2009): 1874–88. Myrent, Glenn, and Georges P. Langlois. Henri Langlois: First Citizen of Cinema. Translated by Lisa Nesselson. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Naraindas, Harish. ‘A Sacramental Theory of Childbirth in India.’ In Childbirth Across Cultures, edited by Helaine Selin, 95–106. Berlin: Springer. 2009. ———. ‘Nospolitics, Epistemic Mangling and the Creolization of Contemporary Ayurveda.’ In Medical Pluralism and Homeopathy in India and Germany (1810–2010): A Comparison of Practices, edited by Martin Dinges, 105–136. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014.

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———. ‘Of Sacraments, Sacramentals and Anthropology: Is Anthropological Explanation Sacramental?’ Anthropology & Medicine 24.3 (2017): 276–300. Narayanan, Kalpana. ‘36 Chowringhee Lane.’ In The Cinema of India, edited by Lalitha Gopalan, 180–89. London: Wallflower Press, 2009. Nichols, Bill. ‘The Voice of Documentary.’ Film Quarterly 36.3 (1983): 17–30. ———. ‘Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde.’ Critical Inquiry 27 (Summer 2001): 580–610. O’Brien, Elaine, et al. Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Openshaw, Jeanne. Seeking B¯ auls of Bengal. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Parry, Jonathan. ‘Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic.’ In Death and the Regeneration of Life, edited by Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, 74– 110. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Pines, Jim, and Paul Willemen, eds. Questions of Third Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 1990. Prasad, Madhava M. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt. Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Raha, Kironmoy. Bengali Cinema. Calcutta: Nandan, 1991. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, ed. Kumar Shahani: The Shock of Desire and Other Essays. New Delhi: Tulika Books in association with the Raza Foundation, 2015. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, and Paul Willemen. Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. 2nd ed. London: Taylor & Francis, 2014. Rascaroli, Laura. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. London: Wallflower, 2009. Ravetto-Biagioli, Kriss. Mythopoetic Cinema: On the Ruins of European Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Ray, Satyajit. ‘An Indian New Wave?’ Our Films, Their Films. 81–99. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1976. Remes, Justin. Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Robinson, Andrew. Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. London: Deutsch, 1989. Rouch, Jean. ‘On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer.’ Translated by Steve Feld and Shari Robertson. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 5 (1978): 2–8. ———. Ciné-Ethnography. Translated by Steve Feld. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

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Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. ———. ‘Ecstatic Ethnography: Maya Deren and the Filming of Possession Rituals.’ In Rites of Realism: Essay on Corporeal Cinema, edited by Ivone Margulies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Santner, Eric L. Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Sen, Mrinal and Subhash Nandy. Montage: Life, Politics, Cinema. Photographs by Subhash Nandy. London: Seagull Books, 2018. Sen, Sudipta. ‘Betwixt Hindus and Muslims: The Many Lives of Zafar Khan, Ghazi of Tribeni.’ Asian Ethnology 76.2 (2017): 213–234. ———. Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film the American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Soudhamini. ‘Film review: Kaal Abhirati.’ Cinemaya: The Asian Film Magazine (Summer 1990): 30–31. Stewart, Tony K. Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Suchenski, Richard I. ‘Mythic and Modern: The Aesthetics of Space in the Films of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani.’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 25.1 (2017): 29–50. Togawa, Masahiko. ‘Syncretism Revisited: Hindus and Muslims over a Saintly Cult in Bengal.’ Numen 55.1 (2008): 27–43. V¯ajapey¯ı, Udayana. Uncloven Space: Mani Kaul in Conversation with Udayan Vajpeyi. Translated by Gurvinder Singh. Hyderabad: Quiver, 2013. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 1989. Warwick, Genevieve. ‘Memory’s Cut: Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid of 1608.’ Art History 40 (2017): 884–903. Woods, Gioia. ‘“Reinvent America and the World”: How Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books Cultivated an International Literature of Dissent.’ European Journal of American Studies 12.2 (2017): 46. Wright, Craig. The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Yarza, Alejandro. The Making and Unmaking of Francoist Kitsch Cinema: From Raza to Pan’s Labyrinth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

Filmography 36 Chowrighee Lane. Directed by Aparna Sen (1981). Aboshesey. Directed by Aditi Roy (2011).

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Aradhana. Directed by Shakti Samanta (1969). Bakita Byaktigoto. Directed by Pradipta Bhattacharyya (2013). Bishar Blues. Directed by Amitabh Chakraborty (2006). Bobby. Directed by Raj Kapoor (1973). Bombay. Directed by Mani Ratnam (1995). Calcutta. Directed by Louis Malle (1969). Celluloid Man. Directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (2012). Chinatown. Directed by Roman Polanski (1974). Chokh. Directed by Utpalendu Chakrabarty (1983). C.I.D. Directed by Raj Khosla (1956). Citizen Kane. Directed by Orson Welles (1941). Cosmic Sex. Directed by Amitabh Chakraborty (2012). Duvidha. Directed by Mani Kaul (1973). Eleven Miles. Directed by Ruchir Joshi (1991). Fiza. Directed by Khalid Mohamed (2000). Gandu. Directed by Qaushik Mukherjee (2010). Garam Hava. Directed by M.S. Sathyu (1973). I Don’t Know What It Is I Am Like. Directed by Bill Viola (1986). India: Matri Bhumi. Directed by Roberto Rossellini (1959). India Song. Directed by Marguerite Duras (1975). Janmadinam. Directed by Suma Josson (1998). Junoon. Directed by Shyam Benegal (1979). Kaal Abhirati. Directed by Amitabh Chakraborty (1989). Kanchana Sita. Directed G. Aravindan (1977). Kitsch Mitsch. Directed by Amitabh Chakraborty (1996). Kutti Japanin Kuzhandaigal. Directed by Chalam Bennurkar (1990). La Jetee. Directed by Chris Marker (1962). La Notte. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1961). Last Year at Marienbad. Directed by Alain Resnais (1961). L’Avventura. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1960). Le Chant des Fous. Directed by Georges Luneau (1979). L’Eclisse. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1962). Love in India. Directed by Quashik Mukherjee (2009). The Lure. Directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska (2015). Mane. Directed by Girish Kasarvalli (1991). Mandi. Directed by Shyam Benegal (1983). Meshes of the Afternoon. Directed by Maya Deren (1943). Mr. & Mrs. ’55. Directed by Guru Dutt (1955). Nagmoti. Directed by Gautam Chattopadhyay (1983). October. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1927). Pakeezah. Directed by Kamal Amrohi (1972). The Passenger. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1975).

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Pather Panchali. Directed by Satyajit Ray (1955). Police Lockup. Directed by Kodi Ramakrishna (1993). Prisoners of Conscience. Directed by Anand Patwardhan (1978). ¡Que viva México! Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1932). Race. Directed by Abbas Alibhai Burmawalla and Mastan Alibhai Burmawalla (2008). Ram Teri Ganga Maili. Directed by Raj Kapoor (1985). Rashomon. Directed by Akira Kurosawa (1950). Rear Window. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1954). The River. Directed by Jean Renoir (1951). Satya. Directed by Ramgopal Varma (1998). Satyam Shivam Sundaram. Directed by Raj Kapoor (1978). Seeta aur Geeta. Directed by Ramesh Sippy (1972). Shodh. Directed by Bipalab Roychoudhury (1981). Solaris. Directed Andrei Tarkovsky (1972). Stalker. Directed Andrei Tarkovsky (1979). Strike. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1925). Thalarndhadhu/It Rested. Directed by S. Soudhamini (1988). That Obscure Object of Desire. Directed by Luis Buñuel (1977). The Third Man. Directed by Carol Reed (1949). Trance and Dance in Bali. Directed by Margaret Meade and Gregory Bateson (1952). Un Chien Andalou. Directed by Luis Buñuel (1929). Vertigo. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1958).

CHAPTER 8

Time Out

Other openings, other configurations, grip my attention as I close this book on digital cinema. Despite my allergic reaction to social media, I concede its role in the fomentation of energies towards certain recent, transformative events within the Indian film industry. This is what my closing chapter devotes itself to, with an eye trained on collectives. Born through the affordances of digital technology and the verve of filmmakers, the digital films created through the synergies of the collective invite a sustained look at their aesthetics: inspiration for another installment of this scholarship perhaps but, for now, the tales of their origins brings me to my own time out. Time Out! That was the directive issued by the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) in March 2017 to the Malayalam film industry. After having endured decades of systematic abuse, harassment, and discrimination from male directors, male actors, and male crews, the tipping point was a scandal of medieval proportions: an actress was abducted and molested by a gang of men. The details of this sordid episode have burned the front pages of newspapers since 2017. The closing of ranks between men in the Malayalam film industry, and the rehabilitation of an accused actor awaiting trial, was an open admission of pacts and alliances between men that had been entrenched for decades in the industry.1 Kerala is a strangely contradictory place. On the one hand, it is a state with progressive left-wing politics that has had one of the highest literacy rates and employment opportunities for women, as well as a cinephile culture with film societies in practically every corner of the state. © The Author(s) 2020 L. Gopalan, Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54096-8_8

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Yet rampant sexism, gender harassment, gender discrimination, and hate crimes against women and LGBTQ members have formed the subject of many conversations I have had with filmmakers over the years. Unbearable working conditions had gone on for far too long. As details of the abduction and arrests rolled across 24-hour news media and messaging platforms, a tsunami of messages on WhatsApp prompted the women of the industry to move from inert rage to action in February 2017. According to cinematographer, Fowzia Fathima, it was Asha Achi Joseph, a social activist and documentary filmmaker, who started the chain of messages that would lead to a gathering of female actors, directors, editors, and others at actor Rima Kallingal’s Mamangam Studio in Ernakulam. It was this gathering that led to the formation of the WCC, which registered as a society in November 2017, a month after fires of #Metoo had been lit in every film industry worldwide. WCC pressed forward with the state government to institute changes in the workplace, which led to the establishment of a commission headed by Justice K. Hema. The Hema Commission Report released in January 2020 offers a series of recommendations to safeguard and ensure the safety of women working in the industry. The creation of this women’s collective has become one of the most impressive of such endeavours in the Indian film industry and beyond. As is normal with most collectives, here too the wide umbrella led to smaller formations, with more specific energies, and calls from other collectives to join forces. As I was following the story of WCC, I came to hear of another women’s collaboration that had been formed: the Indian Women Cinematographers’ Collective (IWCC), which also had a leg in Kerala. IWCC traces its roots to the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), a phase from the mid-1990s. Notwithstanding the ideals that guided the establishment of the national film school, and for all of the celebration of FTII filmmakers, that I can easily join in with, the routine bigotry—evident from admissions interviews to working cultures after graduation—is recounted endless times among women filmmakers. Deepti Gupta, one of the founding members of IWCC, recalls a question posed during her oral entrance exam to FTII by a panel of former cinematographers and professors (a procedure instituted by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting): ‘How can you, a woman five feet tall, have the strength to lift a camera?’2 (Fig. 8.1). Barely twenty years old in 1995, and an undergraduate physics major (a science degree is a preference for cinematographers), Gupta fielded

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Fig. 8.1 IWCC logo

the hostility of the question with her enthusiasm for cinematography and knowledge of light, a tactic she believes clinched their decision to admit her. Once admitted, and being the single woman cinematographer in a class of ten, she was constantly aware of the data that the admissions panel threw at her: three previous women who were admitted into cinematography had failed to complete their degree or failed to practice their craft. ‘The stipulation to succeed was internalised by me and expressed itself by working triply hard, by lifting camera boxes and lugging heavy lights,’ she told me. Despite the constant reminder by some of her teachers of being a ‘girl,’ to her relief, the gender parity was differently distributed in the directing stream of the same batch of students—eight women in a class of ten—and it was with this group that she fused collaborations, semester after semester, on every project. A look at the roster of that class lists six women directors whose futures in different arenas, from directing to writing and teaching, resulted in commendable careers, putting purchase to the expectations of excellence attributed to FTII graduates. Their names are Surabhi Sharma, Nishtha Jain, Ruchika Oberoi, Tripti Gunawardane, Anupama Minz, and Hansa Thapaliyal (Fig. 8.2). Deepti Gupta struck up an early alliance with Nishtha Jain, who had arrived at FTII after having graduated from Jamia Millia in video production and after years of working in television news broadcasting. Gupta was drawn to Jain’s commitment to feminism and involvement in the women’s movement in Delhi; she expressed her eagerness to work with Jain before projects were fired up in the first term. That direct approach to cooperate resulted in Gupta shooting all of Jain’s projects at FTII, from practicals to the Student Diploma Film: ‘I liked how Nishtha expressed herself. Most of all, she would give me a mood palette to work with,’

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Fig. 8.2 Deepti Gupta at work (Courtesy Deepti Gupta)

rather than instructing her to focus on this composition or the other, explained Gupta. The final project, the Student Diploma Film, Jam Invalid, directed by Nishtha Jain, drew the attention of K. K. Mahajan who was present at the screening of these final works in the role of an external assessor, and in the spirit of a legendary alumnus. As the story goes, Jain’s film was the last one, and Mahajan was tired of many of the first works he had been seeing during that evaluation session, such that he had taken to berating his colleagues in the cinematography department. But on seeing Jain’s work, featuring Deepti Gupta’s cinematography, he uttered: ‘I want to meet this girl… her work is like mine.’ Gupta ranked first in her graduating class of cinematographers and Mahajan’s endorsement was significant, a recognition bolstered further on a visit to his home after graduation, where he offered advice that Gupta has steadfastly held on to: ‘Your work is exceptional…don’t assist anybody… your creativity will be affected.’ Gupta absorbed Mahajan’s counsel, realizing the price that it would entail—lengthy periods of unemployment. Great advice for

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creativity, less so for work per se. This commitment to go solo was reinforced after visiting the shooting sets of former alumni for a series of days, an exercise in observation that she had assigned herself to figure out how working sets functioned outside FTII student projects. One such set visit was with the late Michael Chang, who endorsed Gupta’s nascent wish to not assist senior cinematographers and strike out on her own. While Gupta did not seek assistantship, she had a form of apprenticeship well in place: membership in the Cinematographers Combine assured her of guild membership. In this forum, the Combine chose her, the youngest member, and K. K. Mahajan, the oldest, to jointly present the Eastman Kodak Lifetime Achievement for Excellence in Cinematography to Subrata Mitra. Gupta’s encounter with Subrata Mitra was more sustained when she landed in Kolkata in 1998 to shoot Shyamal Karmakar’s Ranu (2001), a film produced by the Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI). Taking advantage of a sojourn in Kolkata and Bishnupur, Gupta would carve out visits to Mitra’s residence, which she remembers as being filled with discussions on practices of cinematography, to the extent that the doyen would ask her to draw detailed diagrams of her lighting arrangements for the film, teasing her about using drop cloths that would issue an ‘All India Film,’ and Gupta, in turn, defending her choices. Ranu, Gupta’s first feature film, did serve as a primer for lighting in her feature works, and her confidence in choosing certain eye levels in its compositions is a feature evident to viewers of the film. Gupta credits the arc of her documentary cinematography style to her long relationship with Jain, who had after graduation become the most well-known feminist documentary filmmaker working in India. After shooting the Diploma fiction film that turned out to be their first collaboration, Gupta was Jain’s principal DOP in many of her first films that put her on the map internationally: City of Photos (2004), Six Yards to Democracy (2006), Lakshmi and Me (2007), Family Album (2007), and more recently Sabuth/ Proof (2019). Gupta exclaims ‘I started loving documentary… the exploration of the gaze of the world.’ She recalls long hours of discussion with Smriti Nevatia Jain, the creator, producer and writer, and Nishtha Jain, during the making of Lakshmi and Me. The central issue that was constantly being discussed was lighting itself: Gupta preferring naturalism versus Jain wishing for a more picturesque composition. Such discussions touch directly on the form of the film that tackles class relationships between women, especially between feminist filmmakers and their household help; it threw the film’s focus onto Nishtha Jain’s own

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domestic space. Lakshmi, the protagonist, who came to work daily, was a willing accomplice in a film that had the lens trained on the quotidian. Gupta remembers the eating scene, in which the camera was placed low on the ground with the crew eating at the table, as a fitting composition to convey the trenchant expression of class differences and hierarchies that did not need the exposition of dialogue. The most important lesson that documentary practices continue to deliver is the ability to court contingency, and shooting Lakshmi and Me was no different. The precipitating drama in the film was one of chance during the shoot: Lakshmi running away after getting pregnant, and her eventual return. This unscripted act changed the film from a quotidian rhythm to one of high drama, when the crew did not expect Lakshmi to return and had to contend with other ways to end the film. Equally important was Lakshmi’s participation in the rally organized by domestic workers that brought the plight of women working in the unorganized labour sector into a public space. ‘We couldn’t have planned these events’ recalls Gupta. Film after film, Gupta recalls the pleasure of working collaboratively with Jain—even after a gap, and as recently as in Sabuth/ Proof , a short fiction film, adapted from a doctor’s narrative that Jain scripted. Gupta had, in the intervening years, worked on a few fiction films with other filmmakers, an experience that she drew on for this short film as well. Attending to Deepti Gupta’s career offers a preview of the arrival, however slowly, of various international co-productions in India through which she encountered changing scales of production and its attendant different work cultures. Soon after working on Ranu, Gupta was recruited as part of the unit for the international production of British director Asif Kapadia’s Warrior (2001). Out of all the assignments in Rajasthan, and the mountains of Manali, Gupta recalls the thrill of a shoot well done, when they were asked to produce handheld shots of a burning village as a special effects assignment. She rounded a grip team together that produced seven shots in total, armed with a big Angénieux zoom lens accessorized to an Arriflex BL3 camera. The dailies that arrived on VHS tapes in those days pronounced the verdict on a hand-written note: ‘Second camera units’ fantastic!’ As is routine with most of the cinematographers graduating from film schools, Gupta survives by shooting advertisements of all kinds—cars, cosmetics, hair, jewellery—but with a firm refusal to shoot for the skin lightening cream Fair and Lovely. It was an advertising contract that led

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her to Anand Surapur, a television producer who also directed shows for Channel V with a reputation of being a ‘maverick.’ In the most obvious route of assignments, Surapur landed on an opportunity to direct a music video starring Rabbi Shergill’s music video Bullah Ki Jaana (2005) and hired Gupta as DOP. With a rock fusion beat, the video has Shergill belting out melancholy strains set against the landscape of the subcontinent; the video enjoyed success on the music charts with an avid following across Pakistan and India. Gupta remembers winning generous accolades from music aficionados in Pakistan during a film festival when they realized that she was the DOP for this rousing music video. This successful collaboration with Surapur led to other assignments, including his feature film The Fakir of Venice (2009) that premiered at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles. The film had distinct marquee features that made it a festival favourite: an all-woman photography crew (Deepti Gupta, Preetha Jayaraman, and Bakul Sharma), music by A.R. Rahman, and actor Farhan Akhtar’s first film. Despite the festival’s encomiums, the film had a belated, decade-long theatrical release in 2019, by then Akhtar was already a household name as both filmmaker and actor. As is often the case, online sites have uploaded versions of the film; its comedy and the ensuing unexpected stalling of a wider exhibition remind me of Urf Professor directed by Pankaj Advani in 2001. In the economy of referrals that govern filmmaking, Deepti Gupta’s name travelled from Farhan Akhtar to Reema Kagti, who hired her to shoot Honeymoon Travelers Pvt. Ltd. (2007). This was a break into Bollywood, with the added advantage of a female crew at the upper levels, from direction onwards. Working on the set day and night, Gupta, steadily realized, however, that the working culture of film production had not really absorbed gender parity—very few of the gaffers and light workers (‘light boys’ is the operative worker assignment) were women—and a din of instructions flying from one supervisor to another ratcheted up a daily decibel level on a large set that was a strain. After working with small crews with Jain, and quieter sets on other shoots, this was a revelation of mainstream working conditions. The shooting experience forced Gupta to consider the possibilities of a feminist praxis and would guide the brief for her own directorial debut with Shut Up Sona (2019).3 Shut up Sona was in process for a few years, well before the #Metoo movement, and had all the feminist energies that the Rotterdam festival wished to showcase: the journey of a singer, Sona Mohapatra, who has faced her own share of travails with the male-dominated music

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industry. After its screening at Rotterdam, Rada Šeši´c, the festival’s film programmer, exclaimed that the film ought to have escaped its slotting as a documentary. The film’s genre bending was noted by Nandini Ramnath in Scroll.in and rightly recognized as a feminist documentary by Nyay Bhushan in Hollywood Reporter, a stance echoed by Naman Ramachandran in Variet y after its premiere at the Mumbai International Film Festival in October 2019. This was now a year after #Metoo had gained momentum among women in the Indian film industries.4 Shut Up Sona is emblematic of Gupta’s ideals of working with a small crew and with a protagonist who is an unabashed feminist. The decision to venture into directing was not just because she had been following Sona Mohapatra’s career with the adulation of a fan, or that she had shot a couple of the singer’s music videos, but also for Gupta it was becoming clear as she was nearing her mid-forties that she could not break the glass ceiling of the mainstream film industry that had a bias against women DOPs, notwithstanding her academic record, endorsement from legendary cinematographers, or an impressive track record of working with international film crews. Without the godfathers that most male cinematographers enjoy, Gupta was heartened to join a call between cinematographers from FTII, women alumini who had joined a year or later after Gupta. That call was from Fowzia Fathima in March 2015 with a proposal to form a women’s cinematographers collective and the rest is now history. Fowzia Fathima dropped her paternal surname long ago, a quiet yet definitive act of self-identity, that offers a preview into a career dotted with many such acts of reinvention and integration.5 We have already encountered Fathima in the ‘Opening’ as the cinematographer who shot successful HDV films in Tamil and Malayalam; her path to cinema, she recalls, had different points of origin. As an undergraduate student in Art History at Stella Maris College in Chennai in the early 1990s, Fathima was equally drawn to painting and sketching—watercolours, portraits, and copying master works—as an early expression as an artist; a neighbour who was an artist would hand over discarded edges of his canvas that Fathima reused. In this world of amateur art practice, she was familiar with Lalit Kala Akademi, with its warren of artist studios, and the beachside idyllic artists’ village of Cholamandel. Her combination of art history and practice turned out to be the ideal calling card for a job at Apparao Art Gallery towards the end of her college years and for a brief stint thereafter. She recalls assisting Anjali

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Ela Menon in the lead-up to her show (‘Follies on Fantastic Furniture’), which opened additional assistantships with the chief curator and gallery owner, Sharan Apparao. This included a sprawling international show, with objects to be identified from the storage rooms of the Archaeological Survey of India and from over forty participating artists’ studios. The excitement of working over a period of nine months for a behemoth of an exhibition that was headed to London, Tokyo, and beyond, had Fathima considering the politics and poetics of curating, interests that she now knew could only be nurtured in a graduate programme in art history. Admitted to Shantiniketan, Delhi Museum, and The Faculty of Arts University of Baroda, she chose Baroda for several reasons including the institution’s commitment to waive the tuition fees for women students. Baroda’s intellectual rigour in both theory and practice enthralled Fathima. In the realm of extra-curricular activities, she witnessed the revival of the dormant Fine Arts Film Club by Pradeep Cherian, an alumnus, who brought film packages from NFAI for screening and discussion. With the global celebration of the centenary of cinema in 1995, a regular stream of films from embassies in Delhi and NFAI (she remembers seeing Ghatak and John Abraham’s films for the first time) packed the screening schedule. Fathima, an artist and art historian, was discovering ‘how the medium of moving image had the potential for meaning and philosophy.’ As the compulsion to do more with cinema was brewing in her, she was absorbed in writing a master’s thesis which had to change course, on her teacher’s advice, from the controversial thesis topic of curating practices in global art market during that heady period, to one that took to the public hoardings of Chennai, cut-outs of the politician Jayalalitha. With a focus on documentation of images in public spaces, Fathima’s thesis drew on the established scholarship by Theodore Baskaran and M.S.S. Pandian on the Dravidian movement’s intimate relationship to cinema.6 Through the study of Jayalalitha’s poster art, she argued that a different reconfiguration was emerging, mythmaking with features of Hindutva imagery. Though she received flak from her advisor Shivaji Panikkar for this overreach in 1995, Fathima’s thesis was prescient in its pronouncement of an alliance between Jayalalitha and the BJP in an upcoming election. As vindicated as Fathima felt by being ranked first in her master’s programme, she was done with the study of representations and cut-outs, and was ready to launch into an engagement with movement, which she missed dearly in her years of flying.

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Fathima’s passion for flying was a parallel pursuit that was sparked in her college years as an art history major, a strong inclination that courses through her practice as a cinematographer to date. Registering at the local flying club even before she knew how to drive a car, Fathima was airborne. As the plane soared over Chennai and Vellore heading out to the coastline and swerving inwards to land at the club’s designated airstrip, she could feel the textures and see the gradations of colours that would inflect her attachment to abstract landscapes. ‘I was flying with Leonardo da Vinci’s premonitions,’ she muses. After securing a private pilot’s licence, flying became a part of a personal retreat during her time in college and well after. The interest in flying morphed into a passion for aeronautical design, and she very much wanted to design her own aircraft. During her day job at the art gallery, she registered for evening classes in aircraft maintenance through Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL)-certified classes in Aeronautics Mechanical Engineering. She was the only woman in the classes, which included working lathes in carpentry workshops and welding nuts and bolts. Her ardour peaked with an associate membership of the Aeronautical Engineering chapter in Chennai. After a semester of this intensive commitment to workshop apprenticeship and flying, Fathima realized that flying was a conceptual and philosophical endeavour for her and she had absolutely no interest in piloting commercial flights or working for a corporation like Boeing. This change of direction spirited her towards the stint in Baroda. With every possibility of education afforded equally by her family to both her brother and herself, there was little to assert about feminist identity when the world presented itself with few barriers. This individual journey of exploration and potential found its reckoning at the FTII entrance exams where she faced the same question that Deepti Gupta had to contend with against a panel composed of Amarjeet Singh, Virendra Saini, and Bhanumurthy Alur: ‘Why should we give you a seat in cinematography when three of the previous women students never practiced?’ Though taken aback, Fathima did not cower, answering instead by throwing the challenge back at them: ‘If since its inception, FTII has had 100 male cinematographers, out of which only a fraction of them have succeeded, clearly it is time for more women to have equal opportunities to succeed and fail.’ Amarjeet Singh, who was supportive, had his own grain of paternalism—he had recently returned from an International Women’s Conference in Beijing and was offered the rationale that shooting films in the aftermath of atrocities, women as these targets

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prefer to talk to women filmmakers. Rather than accept this expression of support, Fathima was thinking about the path to becoming a fighter jet pilot: an aircraft does not know whether the pilot is a man or woman. The unquestioned sexism of the interview remained with her after being admitted, a feminist initiation that she had not considered so far. 1996 was the year of women at FTII. A year junior to Deepti Gupta, Fowzia Fathima and Bindu Nair were two additional female cinematographers, and there were more women students across every specialization: editing, production design, and scriptwriting. With so many women, FTII found itself short on rooms in the women’s hostel and had to commandeer a wing of the men’s hostel to contend with the change in the gender demographic. Foreign students, from India’s relationship with the NonAligned Movement, were not unusual, and this year they included women from Nigeria and Vietnam, including Diêmchi Lêba, an established Vietnamese television director who was retraining as a film director. Despite barriers of communicating in a common language, Fathima struck up a working relationship with Diêmchi Lêba, explaining it as a conscious form of international solidarity with women provoked, in part, by the hazing aspects of the admissions interview. For the Diploma film, Fathima recommended Nancy Adjani as an editor, and with that recruitment she unwittingly set up an all-women crew that would serve as a pilot for her experience later on with Mitr, my friend (2002). To be equal to the men and even excel against them was their goal, recalls Fathima. For their filmmaking exercises, Bindu Nair and she would carry heavy camera equipment up 200 steps without asking for assistants, which was the norm even at the Film Institute. At every turn, both Gupta and Fathima’s accounts of their FTII days are packed with their efforts to erase gender differences during their exercises or not to draw attention. The air was thick with learning possibilities that were enriched by master classes with German feminist director Helma Sanders-Brahms. It bears noting that Jutta Bruckner, another German feminist filmmaker, had visited FTII years earlier. Both filmmakers are the original signatories of the Women Filmmakers Manifesto, a blueprint that figures in syllabi on women filmmakers, including mine. Fathima recalls with great pride organizing a workshop with Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer who provided the visual signature for the new wave films directed by Godard and Truffaut. She designed a situation that involved three friends of three different skin tones hanging out in an apartment drenched with sunlight and surrounded by glass. The class was impressed and eager to learn

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Fig. 8.3 Fowzia Fathima on the set of Ivan (Courtesy Fowzia Fathima)

how Coutard, who even at his advanced age, resolved the problems of light reflection and exposure; epidermal variations are an ongoing issue for Indian filmmakers, as the request of such a lesson demonstrates (Fig. 8.3). Buoyed by the comradeship of technically proficient women in her batch and in the surrounding years, Fathima’s graduation from FTII had her heading off to Chennai to embark on her career. Her first break was as an assistant to P.C. Sriram (hereafter PC) for Mani Ratnam’s Alaipayuthey/Waves (2000).7 In the world of chances and recommendations, PC introduced her to actor, Revathi, who was planning her first directorial venture, Mitr, my Friend, having cracked a screenplay with Sudha Kongara Prasad and recruited Bhavatharini Ilayaraja to conduct the music. Fathima’s discussion with Revathi bolstered the emphasis of an all-women crew that was capped by asking Bina Paul to edit the film. She recalls the excitement of working with an all-women crew, including assistants, as her first feature film as a DOP. Scripted as a family melodrama, the story focuses on an Indian woman, Lakshmi, living with her software engineer husband in the Bay area who is confronting her cloistered life as a housewife and mother of a teenager. The film relies on the possibilities of the internet to further the plot and precipitate a narrative crisis: Lakshmi

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develops a friendship with somebody on an online chat room. It is in her active development towards independence that I cannot help but note Fathima’s influence in Lakshmi’s discovery of a passion for carpentry. As we have seen earlier, Fowzia Fathima rode the wave of the transition to digital filmmaking with the Tamil language film Silandhi/ Spider (2008), a High Definition Video (HDV) film on an extremely small budget and another in Malayalam—Gulumaal: The Escape (2009)—in addition to overseeing the transition of the curriculum from analogue to digital at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute of India (SRFTI), working on international productions and setting up camera work for a lavish television programme commissioned by the filmmaker Kailasam’s Tamil serial production company, Minbimbangal. Kailasam’s untimely death in 2014, had her decamp to Trivandrum. She started shooting smaller projects and was told repeatedly by filmmakers from the region that if you wanted to shoot a feature film you would have to finance your own production, a work economy which revealed the entrenched male bastion of the Trivandrum-based Malayalam language film industry. She missed talking to her women friends, her classmates, and the prospect of finding equal opportunity in cinematography was diminishing: ‘I was feeling isolated and there were too many dead ends in Kerala.’ Given her track record for adventures it was not surprising that she would change this by springing into action. At the annual International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) in 2014, Fathima arrived to watch the projection of her own signature film and to meet old friends and colleagues. Among the films screened was Gatekeeper (2014), a short film shot by Pooja Gupte, who had graduated from SRFTI. It was in these encounters and conversations at the festival that they started talking about the slow invisibility inflicted upon women cinematographers despite their growing numbers; Fathima could count ten to twelve other women—Priya, Pritham, Preeti, Durga, Solanki, and many more she knew—who should have had the opportunity to helm more projects. After discussions with Gupta, Savita, and Priya, on March 11, 2015, they formed a Facebook page under the domain name of Indian Women Cinematographers’ Collective. In less than three days, the membership on the site leapt to forty-four members. After two years of internal discussions conducted on WhatsApp, they had a general body meeting in Mumbai and unanimously agreed that a collective is what they wanted, without the hierarchies of age. To commemorate

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their collective, they launched their website, https://iwcc.in, on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2017. The website is their public face, showcasing each and every member’s portfolio, and the word has gotten around internationally as well: the BBC uses their site to locate cinematographers and Cannes chose the young achiever award by browsing through their site. Since its original design, they have added extra tabs for assistant cinematographers, focus pullers, gaffers, underwater cinematography, and more, to place front and central that these occupations are no longer the exclusive domain of male cinematographers. While the closed Facebook group is for internal discussions, they have taken to sharing their life stories in a forum titled ‘IWCC Inspire’ to address gender inequities in their profession at film schools and panels, to deal with sexual harassment of women DOPs on sets, and to demand equal pay with their male colleagues. As Fathima declares: ‘The website allows you to assemble an all-woman cinematography crew in India.’ Fowzia Fathima’s passion for flying provides the metaphor for freedom that lands a time out to the orthodoxy of the male-dominated field of cinematography.

Film Collectives Riding high on stories of WCC and IWCC, unfolding in the newspapers and flying between filmmakers, I was in the company of Ravikiran Ayyagari imagining alternative forms of filmmaking in August 2018, including the urgent need for collectives in the model of Collective Phase One and Kazcha. Ayyagari offered Human Trail Pictures and Ektara Collective as additional groupings that were set outside the mainstream industry and its distribution networks. That the corporate film festival culture of Jio Mami had premiered their film works in October 2017 speaks of configurations and tax breaks in the globalized economy that direly need more scrutiny. Ayyagari’s lead sent me packing to Heer Ganjwala who was one of the founding members of Human Trail Pictures, a collective born from the 2014 graduating class of FTII. Five friends from the directing class wanted to strike out on their own with anthology films and wanted to do so collectively during a period with vast options on digital platforms. ‘Five slimmed down to three,’ say Heer Ganjwala, Anadi Athaley, and Karma Takapa. Registering as an LLP (Limited Liability Partnership), Human Trail Pictures was the banner that would launch their films on the

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festival circuits: Mor Mann Ke Bharam/An Illusion of My Mind (2015), a Chhattisgarhi film jointly written and directed by Karma Takapa, Heer Ganjwala, and Abhishek Varma, which premiered at Jio Mami Film Festival 2015; and Ralang Road, a Nepali-Hindi language film directed by Takapa at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2017. Plotted during their final years at FTII, Mor Mann Ke Bharam/An Illusion of My Mind represented a commitment to turn away from Bombay cinema and speak to the regions they came from (Anadi Athaley from Chattisgarh, Karma Takapa from Sikkim, and Heer Ganjwala a Gujurati from Bombay) as sources for their films. Mor Mann Ke Bharam/An Illusion of My Mind (2015) was devised on a minimal budget as a self-imposed working constraint. Human Trail Pictures begged and borrowed equipment from Ganjwala’s uncle’s camera rental store to accessorize the borrowed Canon 5D camera and retreated to Chhattisgarh with a plan that Athaley’s contacts would deliver on their script. That is how their shooting plan paid off. Athaley’s family had extensive ties to Raigarh’s Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and a team of actors was assembled in no time; an uncle’s home doubled as a sound studio. Their adventures making their first film are recorded on their website www.humantrailpictures.com, leading us to the immense possibilities that are still out there to be mined in digital filmmaking. Banking on the quickening economy of obsolescence that trails digital cameras, the vast talent of theatre activists across the breadth of India, the ubiquity of low cost post-production, and a taste for rough-hewn independent pictures, Mor Mann Ke Bharam/An Illusion of My Mind asserts a potent combination. While festival recognition and critical acclaim have brought them advance publicity, Human Trail is still figuring out how to disseminate films on platforms that will honour their commitment to collective filmmaking. For now, their two film successes stand out as a model of camaraderie filmmaking, as a time out, an interval, between FTII and market-based mainstream cinemas. Off the grid financially, Ektara Film Collective can be contacted by email. Their website offers two short films free of charge: Hindi language film, Chanda Ke Joote (2011) and Jaadui Machchhi (2013) in Hindi and Bundelkhandi languages. To watch their long feature film, Turup (2017), I duly sent them an email, and they replied with a link that was available to download for a few days, in return for a suggested cash payment of my choice to be sent to an address in Madhya Pradesh. Making fiction films is their collective dream, openly stated in their own

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document, ‘Collectivizing Cinema: The Story of Ektara,’ jointly written by Rinchin and Maheen and uploaded on their website. Their focus on making fiction films from their location in Madhya Pradesh implies a studied distance from the mainstream industrial culture of Mumbai on the one hand, and to embrace fiction as a mode of philosophical, political, and aesthetic expression on the other. Reading the document brings to light the idea of filmmaking as a process of learning the medium, and their attempts to erase the hierarchy between trained and untrained crews as the only path to stave off the alienation that besets makers of fiction film productions, which are routinely large in size and vertical in management. This particular project of joint ownership of stories, methods, and films echoes the worldwide projects of the 1990s when smaller video cameras were distributed among indigenous peoples to reverse the anthropological gaze, and their documentation on film, an initiative consonant with filmmaking manifestos from Third Cinema onwards. In their unwavering focus on games—chess and kabbadi—and immersed in tales of magical realism spinning from the slums and low-income neighbourhoods of their own locales, the films infuse me with the joy of watching the possibilities of fiction as I submit to the pace of their narratives. In my estimation, this version of a time out bears spatial features by its deliberate remoteness from Mumbai and a celebration of propinquity to the place of production and enjoyment. As points of contact via email that brought me to these films, circulating on platforms vastly distinct from theatrical releases and projection, their impulse to subvert the stranglehold of big finances for production and distribution persist among individual filmmakers as well. In the leadup to Christmas 2018, when Mumbai is festooned, I received a phone call from filmmaker, curator, and producer, Pinaki Banerjee, about an impromptu screening of the Konkani film Nachom-ia Kumpasar/Let’s Dance to the Rhythm that had a festival premier in 2014 but disappeared from exhibition thereafter. Very much in the vein of Keluskar’s Kaul (2016), this screening too had been a word of mouth event, shared via social media platforms, that led me to the Fun Republic complex in Andheri where a theatre had been reserved for a screening. Give or take an hour, the film was eventually projected to a packed house. With the help of contributions from friends, Bardroy Barretto launched his period drama set in the 1960s and 1970s. The film presents a thinly veiled story of Goan musicians whose talents were usurped by the Bombay industry. With a wide circulation across film festivals, Nachom-ia Kumpasar stands

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out as an example of films to be produced on a shoestring budget while remaining uncompromising about their narrative subterfuges and that finally deserve to be projected on-screen to a packed house. To recount these stories of collectives and independent spirit is to acknowledge that if we take our sights away from the hubs of mainstream cinemas, akin to the time out that occurs when our computers are not prompted by our touch for a few seconds, a large archive of cinema will surround us. Curatorial programming has been attuned to such smaller scales of production of fiction, leading scholars along routes that deserve a fuller engagement of their poetics.

Conclusion 2020 is the long year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the year of Black Lives Matter, the year for lockdowns and lockups. In this ‘long interregnum,’ enforced time off from outings at theatres and from film festival shindigs, and when I can no longer head to the Viz Cinemas for the annual 3rd i Film Festival, I rely on a publicity still—that serves as this book’s cover—to remind me of perfect projections of slow cinemas relished in a dark theatre. For now, the spectre of a packed house attends my online viewings, the return to theatre imminent.

Notes 1. With pleasures of solidarity, I want to acknowledge my own membership in the Camera Obscura Collective. On this relationship, I want to celebrate our fortieth anniversary that was commemorated as two issues on collective practices. See ‘Collectivity: Part 1,’ Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 31.1 (2016) and ‘Collectivity: Part 2,’ Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 31.3 (2016). 2. Conversations with Deepti Gupta in November 2018, August 2019, and August 2020. 3. Deepti Gupta credits Aditya Bhattacharya for the title of the film, after a viewing at a private screening during the film’s final cut. That Bhattacharya’s film Raakh (1989) is one of my favourites in ‘Bombay Noir’ is a welcome coincidence. 4. Naman Ramachandan, ‘UK’s Espresso Media Takes Festival Darling Indian Doc “Shut Up Sona” (EXCLUSIVE),’ Variety, June 2020. variety.com/ 2020/biz/news/sona-mohapatra-1234644577 (accessed August 2020).

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Nandini Ramnath, ‘Documentary on Sona Mohapatra Is About the Singer Who Refuses to “Shut Up”,’ Scroll.in, November 2019. scroll.in/ reel/942025/documentary-shut-up-sona-is-about-the-singer-who-simplywont (accessed August 2020). Nyay Bhushan, ‘Mumbai: Deepti Gupta’s Doc “Shut Up Sona” Tackles India’s Patriarchy Head-On,’ Hollywood Reporter, October 20, 2019. hollywoodreporter.com/news/deepti-guptas-feminist-doc-shut-up-sona (accessed August 2020). 5. All conversations with Fowzia Fathima were over the period of August 2020. 6. Theodore S. Baskaran, The Message Bearers: The Nationalist Politics and the Entertainment Media in South India, 1880–1945 (Madras: Cre-A, 1981). M.S.S. Pandian, The Image Trap: M.G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1992). 7. My Cinema of Interruptions closes with a chapter on digital aesthetics, and Alaipayuthey is one of the two films discussed, the other being Hey Ram (1999). See Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Conclusion: Digital Imaginings in Indian Popular Films,’ in Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema, 179–200 (London: BFI, 2002).

Bibliography Baskaran, Theodore S. The Message Bearers: The Nationalist Politics and the Entertainment Media in South India, 1880–1945. Madras: Cre-A, 1981. Bhushan, Nyay. ‘Mumbai: Deepti Gupta’s Doc “Shut Up Sona” Tackles India’s Patriarchy Head-On.’ The Hollywood Reporter, October 20, 2019. https:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/deepti-guptas-feminist-doc-shut-upsona-tackles-indias-patriarchy-head-1248898 (accessed August 2020). ‘Collectivity: Part 1.’ Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 31.1 (2016). ‘Collectivity: Part 2.’ Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 31.3 (2016). Gopalan, Lalitha. ‘Conclusion: Digital Imaginings in Indian Popular Films.’ In Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema, 179–200. London: BFI Publishing, 2002. Pandian, M.S.S. The Image Trap: M.G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics. New Delhi: Sage, 1992. Ramachandan, Naman. ‘UK’s Espresso Media Takes Festival Darling Indian Doc “Shut Up Sona.”’ Variety, June 2020. variety.com/2020/biz/news/sonamohapatra-1234644577 (accessed August 2020).

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Ramnath, Nandini. ‘Documentary on Sona Mohapatra Is About the Singer Who Refuses to “Shut Up”.’ Scroll.in, November 2019. scroll.in/reel/942025/ documentary-shut-up-sona-is-about-the-singer-who-simply-wont (accessed August 2020).

Filmography Alai Payuthey. Directed by Mani Ratnam (2000). Chanda Ke Joote. Directed by the Ektara Collective (2011). City of Photos . Directed by Nishta Jain (2004). The Fakir of Venice. Directed by Anand Surapur (2009). Family Album. Directed by Nishta Jain (2007). The Gatekeeper. Directed by Atanu Mukherjee (2014). Gulumaal: The Escape. Directed by V.K. Prakash (2009). Hey Ram. Directed by Kamal Haasan (2000). Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. Directed by Reema Kagti (2007). Jaadui Machchi. Directed by the Ektara Collective (2013). Jam Invalid. Directed by Nishta Jain (1997). Kaul. Directed by Aadish Vasudev Keluskar (2016). Lakshmi and Me. Directed by Nishtha Jain (2007). Mitr, My Friend. Directed by Revathi (2002). Mor Mann Ke Bharam. Directed by Heer Ganjwala, Karma Takapa, and Abhishek Varma (2015). Nachom-ia Kumpasar. Directed by Bardroy Barretto (2015). Raakh. Directed by Aditya Bhattacharya (1989). Ralang Road. Directed by Karma Takapa (2017). Ranu. Directed by Shyamal Karmakar (2001). Sabuth. Directed by Nishta Jain (2019). Shut Up Sona. Directed by Deepti Gupta (2019). Silandhi. Directed by Aathiraj (2008). Six Yards to Democracy. Directed by Nishta Jain (2006). Turup. Directed by the Ektara Collective (2017). Urf Professor. Directed by Pankaj Advani (2001). The Warrior. Directed by Asif Kapadia (2001).

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Warwick, Genevieve. ‘Memory’s Cut: Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid of 1608.’ Art History 40 (2017): 884–903. Wees, William. Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993. Whissel, Kristen. Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. White, Hayden V. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Willemen, Paul. ‘Historical Memorandum: Notions of Third Cinema.’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Considering comparative film studies: In memory of Paul Willemen 14.1 (2013): 94–95. Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Willis, Sharon. ‘Hardware and Hardbodies, What Do Women Want?: A Reading of Thelma and Louise.’ In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, edited by Ava Preacher Collins, Jim Collins, and Hilary Radner, 128–36. New York: Routledge, 1993. Woods, Gioia. ‘“Reinvent America and the World”: How Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books Cultivated an International Literature of Dissent.’ European Journal of American Studies 12.2 (2017): 46. Wright, Craig. The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Yacavone, Daniel. Film Worlds: A Philosphical Aesthetics of Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Yarza, Alejandro. The Making and Unmaking of Francoist Kitsch Cinema: From Raza to Pan’s Labyrinth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Yau, Esther C.M., and Tony Williams, eds. Hong Kong Neo-Noir. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Yengde, Suraj. ‘Dalit Cinema.’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41.3 (2018): 503–18. Zhang, Hongbing. ‘Ruins and Grassroots: Jia Zhangke’s Discontents in the Age of Globalization.’ In Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge, edited by Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, 129–54. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. Zielinski, Siegfried. Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History. Translated by Gloria Custance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999.

Index

A Aadavari Matalaku Arthale Verule (2007), 231 Aakrosh (1980), 217, 258 Aamis/Ravening (2019), 67 Aaranya Kaandam (2010), 47, 56, 92, 127, 139, 226–29, 232, 233, 236, 239, 240, 258, 283, 295 Aar Paar (1954), 270, 295 Aashiq Abu, 242 Aathiraj, 19, 94, 409 Abbas, Ackbar, 135 Abed Fakir, 348 Abhinavagupta, 300 Abraham, Ayisha, 85, 128, 140 Abraham, John, 291, 295, 399 Ab Tak Chappan (2004), 188 acoustic, 61, 166, 182, 218, 233, 274, 362 actualities, 100–6, 111, 129, 130 Adjani, Nancy, 401 Adlabs, 116 Adobe Premiere programmes, 14 Advani, Pankaj, 14, 114, 116, 117, 121, 133, 140, 350, 397, 409

Agacinski, Sylviane, 164 Agamben, Giorgio, 111, 126, 132, 134, 239 Agent Vinod (2012), 192, 206 Agfa stocks, 55 Ahluwalia, Ashim, 50–54, 56–58, 80–83, 93, 241, 259 Ahn, Soo Jeong, 160 Aidondla Aidu (2011), 155, 170 Ajithkumar, D., 58, 61 Akerman, Chantal, 164 Akhtar, Farhan, 92, 397 Aks (2001), 32, 92 Alaipayuthey/Waves (2000), 19, 72, 92, 402 Albera, François, 74 algorithm, 42, 113, 119, 121, 217, 233, 234, 270, 277, 279, 280, 283, 380 Alibaba, 51 Alice in the Cities (1974), 273, 275–77, 295 Ali, Liaquat, 342–44, 346 Al Jazeera, 29

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 L. Gopalan, Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54096-8

435

436

INDEX

Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, 104, 130 Allah, 344, 346, 347 Alsino and the Condor (1983), 59, 92 Alternative Law Forum, 42 Amazon, 28, 156, 243 Ambasamudram, 15, 17 Ambat, Madhu, 203, 240, 251 Amladi, Parag R., 371 Amores Perros (2000), 50, 277, 295 Amores Perros (2002), 92 analogue, 5, 7–10, 15, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 29, 35, 38, 41, 63, 64, 66, 68, 113, 117, 118, 133, 150, 154, 216, 220, 224, 236, 240, 322, 403 anamorphic, 120, 188, 358, 359 Anand, Shaina, 42 Anand, Vijay, 195, 198, 199, 206 Ananthachari, Sashikanth, 56, 154, 245–48, 254, 259, 300, 305–8, 310, 320, 328–30, 333, 339, 358, 375 Ananthachari, S.K., 245, 307 Ananthu, 231 Andaman Islands, 306, 329 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 56, 94 Andersson, Lars Gustaf, 83 Andrew, Geoff, 291 android, 66 Angamalay Diaries (2017), 225 Angelopoulos, Theo, 104, 105, 271 Anhe Ghore da Dhan/Alms for a Blind Horse (2011), 150 animation, 3, 5–8, 102, 109, 112, 130 Anirban, 61 Ankur (1977), 125, 139 The Anthill and the Anvil (2013), 281 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 124, 134, 239, 250, 271–73, 320, 324, 374

Aparajita Tumi (2012), 24, 92 Apparao Art Gallery, 398 apparatus, 64, 74, 108, 126, 147, 158, 164, 188, 283, 323 Aravindan, G., 59, 286, 372 archaeology, 6, 7, 9, 52, 108, 125, 130, 192, 292, 342 archive, 8, 9, 13, 29, 39, 41, 43, 47, 48, 53, 57, 68–70, 76, 82, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104, 106, 108, 110–13, 117, 121, 124–31, 144, 146, 177, 178, 191, 199, 210, 213, 218–20, 226, 232, 244, 249, 270, 272, 277, 281, 283, 298, 299, 309–11, 327, 329–31, 333, 340, 341, 350, 361, 370, 375, 376, 380, 407 film archive, 97, 98, 104, 111, 129, 262 National Film Archive of India (NFAI), 59, 62, 129, 130, 251, 309–11, 372, 399 Ardh Satya (1983), 217, 252 Arendt, Hannah, 131 Arrival (1980), 56, 92 Arsenal, Berlin, 8, 334 Artaud, 336 art cinema, 21, 48–50, 70, 83, 99, 141–44, 148, 149, 239, 243, 246, 251, 262, 297, 298, 302, 304, 307, 308, 312, 316, 323, 324, 327, 364–67, 369, 370, 372, 374, 376 Arthur, Paul, 334, 375 Art Institute of Chicago, 49 Arun, Avinash, 31 Arun, Ruchir, 31 Asha Jaoar Majhe/Labour of Love (2014), 148 Ash is Purest White (2018), 281, 295 Ashwatthama (2017), 35, 36, 92 Asia/Central Asia, 11, 80, 261

INDEX

A Song of Ceylon (1985), 286, 296 The Assassin (2015), 149, 170 assemblage, 23, 48, 50, 237, 245, 279, 326 Athaley, Anadi, 404, 405 Athique, Adrian, 132 Athisayalokam/Wonder World (2001), 284, 295 A Tryst with the People of India (1997), 42, 95 Au Hazard Balthazar (1966), 275, 295 auteur, 44, 46, 47, 58, 61, 67, 70, 83, 102, 141–44, 147, 149–51, 156, 161, 209, 212, 213, 240, 275, 297–99, 302, 304, 305, 312, 321, 330, 333, 339, 352, 363 Avant-doc, 8 Avant-garde, 6, 129, 142, 298, 312, 316, 317, 319, 324, 327–29, 334, 335, 375, 376 Avid, Media Composer, 16, 34, 61 Avikunthak, Ashish, 48, 49 Ayyagari, Ravi Kiran, 29–39, 78, 404 Azad, Maulana, 7 Azhar Fakir, 343, 344, 355 B Babri Masjid, 40, 41, 350 backups, 13, 23, 26, 41, 114–16, 121 Bagchi, Jeebesh, 11, 13 Baker, Sean, 66, 95 Bakshi, Kaustav, 369 Bala, 211, 213, 214, 227, 240, 241, 259 Balachander, K., 245 Balan, Canan, 300, 367 Balasubramanyam, S.P., 231 Baldessari, John, 71 Balfour, Ian, 298, 367 Bali, Karan, 46

437

Bandy, Mary Lea, 131 Banerjee, Dibakar, 28, 44, 94, 139 Banerjee, Pinaki, 56–58, 84, 264, 371, 406 Banerjee, Utpal K., 378 Bangladesh, 105, 344, 352, 364 Bard College, 55 Barman, Partha Pratim, 341 Barretto, Bardroy, 406, 409 Barve, Rahi Anil, 51 Baskaran, Theodore, 245, 254, 399, 408 Basu, Arghya, 244 Bateson, Gregory, 336 Baul–Fakir Association, 348 Baul, Kartik, 334, 337, 340, 343, 348, 364 Bauls, 303, 327, 333, 334, 340–42, 377 Baumgartel, Tilman, 249 Bazin, André, 6, 49, 71, 81, 338, 366 BBC, 40, 404 Beach, Timothy, 240, 253 Behl, Kannu, 127, 140 Behrend, Heike, 376 Bel Geddes, Norman, 278, 279, 292 Beller, Jonathan, 117, 133 Bellori, G.P., 313 Bellour, Raymond, 9, 71, 74, 159, 236, 252, 278, 291 Benegal, Shyam, 125, 139 Bengal Chitra Bikun, 303 Bengal/West Bengal, 25, 83, 266, 299–304, 326, 327, 329–32, 337, 340, 341, 343, 344, 346, 347, 351, 364, 368, 379 Benjamin, Walter, 110, 131, 132 Bennett, James, 133, 291 Bennington, Geoffrey, 253, 292 Bennurkar, Chalam, 310, 332 Bergman, Ingmar, 59, 92 Bergson, Henri, 159

438

INDEX

Berlinale, 8, 50, 143, 210, 264, 266 Bertolucci, 16 Betancourt, Michael, 72 Beugnet, Martine, 85, 120, 134 B-films, 47, 52, 199, 242, 286, 327 Bhagyaraj, 213 Bhakri, Mohan, 55 Bhakti, 340, 365 Bharadwaj, Vishal, 46, 180, 189 Bharathiraja, 231, 258 Bharucha, Rustom, 374 Bhashyam, Srinivas, 199, 207 Bhaskar, Ira, 79, 142, 151, 161, 165 Bhattacharya, Aditya, 45, 92, 177–79, 202, 207, 251, 259, 407, 409 Bhattacharya, Bhaswati, 374 Bhattacharya, Malay, 13, 66, 93, 262, 264–66, 268, 270, 291, 295 Bhattacharya, Nilanjan, 301, 303, 312, 369, 373 Bhaumik, Kaushik, 143, 161 Bhavni Bhavai (1980), 99, 102, 139 Bhoot /Ghost (2003), 29, 187 Bhushan, Nyay, 398, 408 Bhuvan Shome (1969), 125, 139 Bicycle Thieves (1948), 280, 295 Bi Gan, 149, 171 The Big Heat (1953), 176, 206 Binford, Reym, 370 Bioscope: Screen Cultures of South Asia, 13 Birbaum, 342, 363 The Birth of Venus , 354 Bishar Blues (2006), 297, 311, 330, 331, 333, 340–42, 347, 350–52, 355, 356, 364, 375 Biswas, Moinak, 13, 75, 263, 291, 372, 374 Bitomsky, Hartmut, 278, 296 bit-torrent-cinemas, 67 Black Friday (2004), 45, 92, 191, 206

Black Lives Matter, 407 Blood of the Beasts (1949), 129, 139, 286, 295 Blum-Reid, Sylvie, 290 blur, 18, 120, 123, 124, 153, 158 Bollywood, 32, 46, 51, 52, 57, 60, 80, 178, 180, 189, 200, 248, 362, 397 Bombay (1995), 40, 72, 92, 358 Bombay Noir, 46, 58, 70, 143, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181, 188, 192, 200, 202, 329 Bombay: Our City (1985), 33 Borges, Jorge Luis, 277, 291 Bosch, Hieronymus, 281–83 Botticelli, 354 Boym, Svetalana, 14 Brahman Naman (2016), 47, 92 Brahmaputra, 18, 300, 364 Breckenridge, Carol, 130 Bresson, Robert, 6, 49, 94, 275, 295, 303 Brinkman, Eugenia, 69 Brown, Tom, 133, 291 Brown, William, 66, 85 Bruckner, Jutta, 401 Buckland, Warren, 53, 81 Bukatman, Scott, 292 Bulbul can Sing (2018), 67, 92 Bullah Ki Jaana (2005), 397 Bundelkhandi, 405 Buñuel, Luis, 296, 317, 324, 325, 361 Burnett, Colin, 371 Butler, Brad, 372

C Caché (2005), 147, 170 Cagle, Robert, 51 Caillois, Roger, 276, 281, 291 Cakrabart¯ı, Sudh¯ıra, 378

INDEX

Calabrese, Omar, 250 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies , 407 cameras Alexa 2K, 144 Alexa Classic, 34 Arri’s Alexa, 21 Arri Alexa Mini, 37 Arri Alexa Mini LF, 38 Arri Amira, 21 Arriflex 35 IIC, 31 Arriflex 435, 238 Arriflex 535A, 33 Arriflex 535B, 33 Arriflex BL3, 396 Black Magic, 273 Blackmagic 4K, 21 Bolex camera, 307 Canon 1 EOS-1D Mark IV, 50 Canon 5D DSLR, 24 Canon 5D Mark 2, 35, 61 digital SI2K, 238 digital single lens reflex (DSLR), 21, 35, 64 GoPro, 64, 279 HDV, 19, 20, 28, 398, 403 Hi-Band U-matic camera, 191 Ikonoscope Acam D II, 38 MiniDV camcorder VX 2000, 122 Nikon 7D (2), 64 Panasonic, 21, 54 Pentax K1000 still camera, 30 Red camera, 18 Red Scarlet, 21 Sony DSR 500, 15, 114 Sony DVCAM DSR- PD 100, 30 Sony F55, 21 SONY F65, 37, 38 Sony Hi-8 camera (Sony 3CCD-VX3), 16 Sony Venice, 37 Super 35, 238

439

35mm cameras, 15, 19 Cameron, Allan, 134, 221, 250 CAMP, 39, 42. See also Anand, Shaina; Sukumaran, Ashok Campany, David, 253 Camus, Albert, 271 Cannes, 45, 62, 67, 143, 150, 151, 162, 241, 404 Un Certain Regard, 51 capitalism digital capitalism, 8, 50, 64, 72, 127 global capitalism, 9, 41, 44, 45, 98, 114, 121, 126, 127, 143, 148, 149, 200, 244, 303, 330 neoliberal capitalism, 8, 43 Capwell, Charles, 377 Caravaggio, 313, 314, 373 Sleeping Cupid (1603), 313, 314 Casetti, Francesco, 72 Castro Theatre, 155 Cavell, Stanley, 367 cell phone. See android; cellular; iPhone; mobile cellular, 183–86 celluloid, 9, 14–16, 23, 25, 27, 28, 34, 39, 50, 51, 54–56, 78, 81, 82, 98, 104, 108, 113, 116, 118, 119, 128, 132, 145, 147, 159, 191, 217, 233, 269, 286, 288, 311 Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), 47 censors, 19, 234 censorship, 47 The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), 11, 12, 48 Ceylan, Nuri, 275 Computer-generated imagery effects, 25, 132, 234

440

INDEX

Chakraborty, Amitabh, 25, 48, 49, 57, 69, 92, 93, 125, 160, 246, 297–301, 305–14, 316, 318, 320–22, 324–32, 339, 341, 342, 344–47, 349, 351–53, 356, 358–62, 365, 371, 373, 378, 379 Chakraborty, Utpalendu, 302 Chakra Television channel, 329, 331 Chakravarthy, Venkatesh, 245, 250 Chanda Ke Joote (2011), 405 Chang, Michael, 395 Chan, Kim-Mui E. Elaine, 201 Chase, James Hadley, 195, 198 The Whiff of Money (1969), 195 Chatman, Seymour Benjamin, 374 Chatterjee, Subhajit, 80 Chatterji, Shoma, 369 Chattopadhyay, Gautam, 303, 327, 328, 330, 337 Chaturvedi, Hemant, 33, 180, 188, 189, 203 Chaudhry, Ishmeet Kaur, 82, 83 Chaudhuri, Amit, 372 Chauthi Koot/The Fourth Direction (2015), 151 Chennai, 18–20, 37, 47, 68, 76, 77, 112, 127, 143, 144, 209, 212, 224, 226, 227, 231, 238–42, 244, 245, 248, 287, 306, 332, 333, 398–400, 402 Madras, 59, 76, 105, 227, 238, 239, 241, 245–47, 333 Cherian, V.K., 84, 304, 370 Chhattisgarh/Chhattisgarhi, 405 Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI), 114, 395 China, 63, 124, 239 China Hehe Pictures, 51 Chinatown (1977), 361 Chion, Michel, 134, 147, 164, 274, 291, 338, 339, 377 Chistya, 346

Chitrabani, 329 Chitrabani Centre, 303 Chitrabhang (1975), 8, 92 Chitrakala Parishad, 59 Chokh (1982), 302 Cholamandel, 398 Chong, Ruby, 160 Chopra, Vidhu Vinod, 139, 161, 176, 177, 189, 202, 207, 224, 251, 252, 258, 259 Choudhury, Kabir Singh, 57 Chowdhury, Maitreyee Bhattacharjee, 374 C.I.D. (1956), 176, 198, 206, 317 Cine Central, 303, 368, 380 Cine Club/Eisenstein Cine Club, 303 Cinema Nova Brussels, 122 Cinema of Interruptions (2002), 72, 77, 113, 154, 176, 204, 220, 233, 250, 251, 340, 408 Cinema of Prayoga, 311, 372, 373 Cinema of the hood, 218 cinematicity, 7, 29, 46, 72, 248, 254 cinematographer, 13–15, 18, 21–27, 29–31, 33–36, 58, 59, 66, 76, 78, 104, 106, 107, 112, 114, 125, 144, 154, 179, 180, 188, 213, 215, 218, 238, 240, 246, 251, 262, 263, 267, 302, 307, 310, 320, 324, 339, 352, 354, 358, 359, 378, 392–96, 398, 400, 401, 403, 404 Cinematographers Combine, 395 cinematography, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 35, 61, 76, 145, 149, 189, 202, 203, 216, 224, 226, 247, 262–64, 303, 358, 363, 374, 393–95, 400, 403, 404 Cinema verité, 66 cinephilia/cinephile, 7, 17, 51, 59, 67, 70, 71, 78, 98, 99, 113, 115, 121, 124, 133, 143,

INDEX

164, 176, 177, 179, 181, 188, 190–92, 195, 198–200, 212–14, 220, 226, 229, 232, 244, 264, 272–74, 276–78, 283, 297, 302, 303, 311, 327, 331, 361, 363, 372, 373, 391 Cineuropa, 47 City Lights’ Bookstore, 328, 375 City of God (2002), 145, 170, 218, 258 City of Photos (2004), 395, 409 The Clock (2010-2011), 232 Cloud, 77, 124, 154, 166 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 275 Clover, Carol, 286, 292 The Clown and the Dog (1983), 264, 295 Cohan, Steven, 290 collage, 282, 283 Collective, collectives, 11, 13, 24, 35, 42, 46, 58–61, 63, 65, 66, 69, 109, 143, 190, 191, 204, 213, 284, 285, 299, 307, 350, 391, 392, 398, 403–5, 407 Collective Phase One, 58, 60, 63, 66, 404 colour, 25, 28, 31, 32, 34, 101, 108, 178, 180, 198, 310, 375, 400 colour grading, 24, 34, 38 The Colour of Pomegranates (1969), 7 Company (2002), 182 Copjec, Joan, 202, 300, 362, 368 Copper River (1991), 15, 92 Corbin, Henry, 300, 368 Corrigan, Timothy, 334, 338, 375, 377 Corsi, Marco, 83 Cosmic Sex (2012), 48, 57, 92, 297, 324, 330, 351, 352, 354, 356, 360, 361, 363, 365 Court (2014), 144 Coutard, Raoul, 401, 402

441

COVID-19, 407 CREAM, 13 Creekmur, Corey, 175, 176, 179, 201 Cries and Whispers (1972), 59, 92 crime thrillers/gangsters, 46, 119, 181, 183, 185, 186, 229, 239, 317 Cronenberg, David, 78, 281, 295 Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000), 149 Cruel Cinema: Tamil New Wave Cinema, 68 Cuarón, Alfonso, 161, 162, 277, 296 Cubitt, Sean, 73, 77, 113, 126, 132, 134, 234, 252, 292 cult, 43, 44, 47, 49, 68, 69, 110, 113, 115, 116, 124, 177, 198, 214, 225, 226, 229, 231, 243, 327, 330, 342, 363, 373 curatorial, 11, 27, 28, 39, 47, 68, 71, 113, 141, 143, 200, 209, 210, 232, 253, 275–77, 304, 311, 331, 407 curator, 47, 49 film programming, 47 D Dadaism, 316 Daddy (2017), 57 Daiei, 55 Dalí, Salvador, 281 Dalit cinema/Dalit, 144, 166 dark philosophy, 301 Das, Chirantan, 15, 114, 133 Dasgupta, Buddhadeb, 263, 264, 302, 305 Dasgupta, Rohit K., 166, 369 Das, Rahul, 377 Das, Rima, 18, 67, 92, 95 Das, Veena, 146, 163 Data, 13, 22–25, 35, 42, 64–66, 113, 117, 282, 393

442

INDEX

metadata, 28 Database cinema, 117 Datha Baba Mehboob Shah, 346 Datta Alam, 345 Datta, Sangeeta, 369 da Vinci, Leonardo, 400 Deakin, Roger, 38 Debnath, Amit, 341 de Carvalho, Victa, 292 de Chirico, Giorgio, 320, 373 The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913), 320 Deep Focus , 308, 372 Dehatathya, 360, 362–64 Deleuze, Gilles, 49, 85, 117, 133, 159, 249, 250, 261, 290, 301, 360, 369 Delhi, 3, 4, 7, 9–11, 28, 36, 63, 83, 100, 104, 105, 107, 114, 122–24, 126, 151, 303, 332, 352, 374, 393, 399 Deohans, Kiran, 32 Deren, Maya, 286, 335, 336, 376 Derrida, Jacques, 101, 129, 158, 166, 204, 252, 292 Desai, Jigna, 80 Desai, Mrinal, 144 de Sica, Vittorio, 171, 280, 295 Desser, David, 166, 175, 176, 201, 203 de Valck, Marijke, 141, 160, 164 Devasundaram, Ashvin Immanuel, 80, 161, 165 Devji, Faisal, 379 De Wachter, Ellen Mara, 12, 75 Dhar, Arati, 133 diary films, 334, 335, 338 Dick, Philip K., 158 digi-beta, 28 digital animation, 5–8 digital born, 13, 14

digital cinema, 7, 8, 10, 47, 56, 66, 117, 127, 147, 220, 232, 242, 249, 267, 269, 272, 391 Digital Cinema Package (DCP), 26, 62, 67, 244, 273 digital codes/codes, 12, 25, 26, 34, 176, 182, 196, 219, 233 digital effects, 38, 112, 113, 115, 123, 132, 188, 223, 233, 234, 248, 285 digital feature, 50, 98, 114, 119, 122, 127 digital film, 7, 8, 10, 14, 19, 53, 98, 114, 119, 159, 191, 245, 279, 284, 285 Digital Intermediary (DI), 34, 35 digital packaging, 6 digital projection, 14, 20, 26, 35, 113, 288 digital sensors, 24, 25, 35, 154 digital signals, 6, 29, 109 Digital Theatre Systems Inc. (DTS), 26 digital video, 27, 98, 158, 276 digitisation, 19, 41, 49, 109, 305, 334, 375 Dil Par Mat Le Yaar (2000), 28, 92, 188 Dimendberg, Edward, 203, 278–80, 292 Dimock, Edward, 340 The Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF), 310 Director of Photography (DOP), 19, 55, 60, 395, 397, 402 Disco Dancer (1982), 230, 258 Dispositif, 14, 28, 126, 141, 147, 239, 246, 274, 279, 280, 285, 289, 292, 333, 339 Dissanayake, Wimal, 161, 165, 166 Divya Drishti (2002), 14, 15, 26, 92, 122, 124, 126, 139

INDEX

Doane, Mary Ann, 72 documentary, 8, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 33, 39–42, 44, 45, 49, 52, 55, 57, 81, 82, 97, 99, 100, 103, 105, 129, 144, 155, 246, 247, 273, 280, 301, 304, 306, 310, 329–37, 339–42, 350–52, 356, 365, 371, 373, 376, 392, 395, 396, 398 observational documentary, 144, 146–48, 330, 337, 356 Dodiya, Atul, 131 Dogma, 22, 114 Dolby digital, 155 Don (2006), 33 Doordarshan, 27, 42, 76, 191, 219, 301, 306, 310, 311, 331 Doordarshan 1 and 2, 44 dotara, 345, 347 Down by Law (1986), 275, 295 Downloads, 114, 277, 405 Dreschke, Anja, 376 Dubai, 29, 116, 188 Dubashi, Hamid, 300 dubbed versions, 20 Duchamp, Marcel, 316, 317 Ane/mic Cine/ma (1926), 316 Nude Descending a Staircase N. 2 (1912), 316 Dupieux, Quentin, 277, 296 duration, 19, 69, 83, 106, 134, 144, 147, 149, 150, 154–56, 158, 162, 181, 220, 224, 225, 229, 237–39, 243, 246, 278, 279, 313, 315, 322, 326, 331, 336, 344, 351, 360 Düsseldorf, 273 Dutta, J.P., 161, 220, 258 Dutta, Madhusree, 39–41, 78, 92–94 Dutt, Guru, 179, 206, 270, 295 Kaagaz ke Phool/Paper Boats (1959), 179, 206

443

Mr. & Mrs. ’55 (1955), 179 Duvidha (1973), 361, 371 DVCAM, 15 DV Cam Sony DSR 500, 15 DVD, 28, 43, 63, 66, 68, 69, 98, 115–17, 133, 141, 162, 177, 186, 191, 195, 201, 228–30, 274–79, 281, 283, 291, 311 Dyer, Richard, 202 Dylan, Bob, 341 dystopia/dystopian, 127, 188, 189, 201, 243 E Eastern European cinemas, 145 Easy Rider (1969), 277, 290, 295 Eaton, Richard Maxwell, 368 eco-cinema/eco-horror, 126, 134, 154, 156, 280, 364 Eco, Umberto, 250 editing, 7, 14, 16, 18, 22, 34, 37, 53, 58, 59, 61, 64, 67, 102, 106, 109, 110, 113, 114, 117, 118, 121, 131, 149, 151, 182, 223, 224, 226, 235, 236, 244, 251, 266, 282, 283, 305, 306, 309, 317, 331–33, 336, 341, 344, 352, 353, 355, 356, 358, 379, 401 non-linear editing, 16, 19, 34, 118, 220, 224 Egaro Mile/Eleven Miles (1991), 33, 92, 332–40, 342 Egoyan, Atom, 78, 298, 367 Eight Column Affair (1987), 189, 206 Eisenstein, Sergei, 59, 129, 131, 303, 309, 311, 322, 325, 326 Ek Hasina Thi (2004), 190, 192, 199, 206 Ek Musafir Ek Hasina (1962), 154, 170

444

INDEX

Ektara, 344 Ektara Collective, 66, 404, 405, 409 Eleftheoriotis, Dimitris, 261, 262 Elsaesser, Thomas, 112, 132, 367 Enticknap, Leo, 75 En Uyir Thozan (1990), 218, 250, 258 Enzewor, Okwui, 335, 376 Erice, Victor, 36, 94 Espinosa, Julio Garcia, 79 essay/essayistic/essay film, 6, 10, 13, 46, 49, 66, 67, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 82, 83, 85, 97, 120, 128, 130–34, 141, 159, 166, 176, 201, 202, 254, 262, 278, 291, 293, 299–301, 313, 334, 335, 337, 338, 341, 370, 371, 374, 376, 380 European Union, 275 eXistenz (1999), 281, 295 Experimenta, 44, 49, 310, 311 experimental, 6–8, 39, 44, 48, 55, 70, 71, 75, 78, 80, 81, 142, 159, 244–46, 262, 264, 298, 311, 332, 350, 374 expressionism/expressionist, 25, 179, 363, 366 Eyes Wide Shut (1999), 196, 206

F The Faculty of Arts University of Baroda, 399 Fakir, fakiri, 331, 341, 343 The Fakir of Venice (2009), 397, 409 Family Album (2007), 395, 409 Fandry/Pig (2013), 156 Farocki, Haroun, 335 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 59, 129, 139 Fathima, Fowzia, 18–21, 392, 398, 402–4, 408

Federation of Film Societies of India (FFSI), 303 Ferguson, Kevin L., 134 Ferrari, Fabrizio M., 377 Field, Allyson, 366 Film 16mm, 13, 19, 24, 30, 38, 41, 45, 54, 191, 216, 238, 240, 244, 245, 249, 288, 307, 310, 333, 350, 372, 373 35mm, 22, 24, 30, 35, 36, 38, 49, 54, 68, 81, 82, 216, 236, 240, 269, 307, 309–12, 331, 372 Film and Television Archive, UCLA, 130 Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), 14, 15, 18, 21, 23–25, 29–31, 34, 35, 38, 55, 58–61, 63, 71, 78, 83, 84, 99, 114, 131, 134, 149, 150, 154, 155, 159, 165, 241, 246, 251, 264, 300, 304–10, 315, 332, 339, 350, 363, 369, 370, 372, 378, 392, 393, 395, 398, 400–2, 404, 405 Film City, 29, 34, 124 Film Festivals Alba International Film Festival, Italy, 341 and Eighteenth Film Columbia Festival, Chatham, New York, 273 Bengaluru International Film Festival, 273 Berlinale, 8, 143 the biennial Yamagata International Film Festival, Japan, 341 Bilan Ethnographic Film Festival, Paris, 341 Brahmaputra Valley Film Festival, 67 Busan International Festival, 62

INDEX

Busan International Film Festival, 141 Cairo International Film Festival, 19 Cine Central’s International Film Festival, 304 Commonwealth Film Festival, 122 Deauville Film Festival, 62 Digital Talkies International Film Festival, 114, 122 Fantastic Film Festival, 210 Hong Kong International Film Festival, 141 International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), 403 International Film Festival of India (IFFI), 62, 263, 308, 341 International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), 62 International Film Festival Rotterdam, 62, 160, 164, 253, 284 Karachi International Film Fest in Pakistan, 122 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, 405 Kashish, 44 Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF), 8, 45, 248 La Rochelle International Film Festival, 62 London Asian Film Festival, 226 London Indian Film Festival (LIFF), 47 MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, 273 Marrakech Film Festival, 62 Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), 56, 115, 133, 273, 283, 404, 405 Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF), 44, 398 Munich Dokfest, 341

445

Nomadsland, Washington, DC, 341 Osian Film Festival, 48, 352 Rome Film Festival, 63 San Francisco International Film Festival (SIFF), 56 Sardinia Ethnographic Film Festival, 341 Singapore International Film Festival, 122 3rd i Film Festival, 66, 69, 126, 242, 285, 407 3rd i, San Francisco South Asian International Film Festival, 273 Three Continents Nantes Film Festival, 62 Torino Film Festival, 62 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), 50, 51, 143, 210, 241 Venezia 57 Corto Cortissimo, 122 Venice, 62, 141, 144, 148, 161 Venice International Film Festival, 162 Washington DC Film Festival, 99 Wisdom Tree Festival, 310 Film Finance Corporation (FFC), 142, 302 Film Inquiry Committee of 1954, 59 Film-philosophy, 246, 262, 299, 300 Films Division (FD), 21, 44, 48, 49, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 154, 309, 338, 350 Film Society, 13, 48, 59–61, 76, 244, 288, 307, 309–11 Odessa Film Society, 307, 310 Sumangala Film Society, 59 Final Cut Pro, 14, 122 focus puller, 38, 404 footage, 3, 16, 27–29, 31, 36, 39, 41, 42, 52, 55, 64, 97, 99–104, 106–9, 111, 112, 129, 131, 187, 276, 278, 279, 285, 286, 332, 336, 339, 370

446

INDEX

Fortissimo, 50, 51, 63, 80 Fossati, Giovanna, 77, 240, 253 Foucault, Michel, 126 Franju, Georges, 129, 204, 286, 295 Frank, Aparna, 71 Frater, Patrick, 80 Freccia, Ilaria, 15, 16, 18, 75, 94 French New Wave, 84, 212 Freud, Sigmund, 129, 362 Friedberg, Anne, 72 Fried Fish, Chicken Soup, and a Premiere Show (2012), 68, 93 Frog (2012), 284, 285, 295 Fuhrmann, Arnika, 367 Fuji film stock, 31, 33, 54, 333 Fujifilm, 34 Fuji Film Lab, 34 Fuji RDI stock, 34 Fuller, Matthew, 71 G Gaadi (2018), 242 Gaali Beeja/Wind Seed (2015), 13, 14, 66, 93, 262, 273, 274, 276, 277, 279–81, 283, 284, 286, 288, 289, 291, 295 Gabriel, Teshome, 79 Gabrys, Jennifer, 72, 77, 135 Gadihoke, Sabeena, 131 Gallagher, Mark, 201 Galt, Rosalind, 366 Gandhi (1982), 109, 139 Gandhi, Anand, 29, 45, 50, 51, 63, 94 Gandu (2010), 47, 93, 226, 258, 365 Ganesan, Sivaji, 17 Gangar, Amrit, 48, 166, 309, 311, 312, 316, 373 Gangopadhyay, Sunil, 328 Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), 45, 47, 56, 60, 93, 192, 206, 225–27, 241, 258

Ganguly, Keya, 372 Ganjwala, Heer, 404, 405, 409 Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510), 281, 282 Garibotto, Verónica, 290 Gatekeeper (2014), 403, 409 Gaudreault, André, 73 Geiger, Jeffrey, 72, 85, 254, 255 Genre, 7, 46, 52, 54, 57, 81, 99, 103, 106–8, 132, 143, 150, 160, 175–83, 185, 187, 189, 192, 200, 226, 242, 250, 262, 267, 272, 273, 275, 278, 285, 287, 289, 338, 398 action-drama, 19 ‘B grade’, 19 Gerber, Jan, 42 Getino, Octavio, 43, 79 Ghalib, Mirza, 7 Ghashiram Kotwal (1976), 66 Ghatak, Ritwik, 83, 154, 246, 247, 259, 298, 300–2, 306, 340, 368, 369, 374, 380, 399 Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon/Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis (2018), 3, 9 Ghosh, Gautam, 302 Ghosh, Rituparno, 302, 369 Ghost Dog (1999), 179, 206 Ghulam Fakir, 348 Gibbs, John, 163 Ginsberg, Allen, 328 Gleaners and I (2000), 277, 295 glitch, 5, 6, 62 glitchy, 6 globalisation, 43, 45, 52, 79, 126, 127, 146, 164, 181, 241, 252, 279, 281 Global Positioning System (GPS), 289 Godard, Jean-Luc, 78, 110, 128, 131, 324, 401 Godhra, 29, 39, 131

INDEX

Goel, Shumona, 81, 264 Gokulsing, K. Moti, 161, 165, 166 The Gold-Laden Sheep and the Sacred Mountain (2018), 58, 93 Gomatam, Krishnan Seshadri, 19, 93 González, Juan Pablo, 239 Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), 220 Gooptu, Sharmistha, 371 Gopalakrishnan, Adoor, 59 Gopalan, Lalitha, 77–79, 81, 84, 85, 128, 134, 162, 165, 203, 248–50, 254, 293, 369, 380, 408 Gopal, Sangita, 80 Gordon, Douglas, 10, 236, 283, 373 Goriunova, Olga, 6 Gorky Sadan, 304, 341 Gott, Michael, 290 Govinda! Govinda! (1993), 199 Granta, 332 green screen, 233, 236, 285 Gresham’s Law, 200 Grey Scale, 38 Grierson, John, 335, 338 Griffiths, Alison, 73, 108, 130 Grundman, Roy, 164 Guangzhou Triennial (2012), 27 Guattari, Félix, 117, 133 Guilbaut, Serge, 366 Gulaal (2009), 191, 206 Gulumaal: The Escape (2009), 20, 93, 403, 409 Gunawardane, Tripti, 393 Guneratne, Anthony, 366 Gupta, Akhil, 163 Gupta, Alisha Haridasani, 132 Gupta, Deepti, 392–94, 396, 397, 400, 401, 407–9 Gupta, Dhruba, 308, 372 Gupta, Kaushik, 306 Gupta, Narayani, 107, 130 Gupte, Pooja, 403 Gurgaon (2017), 126

447

Guru (2007), 50

H Haazaron Kwashein Mein/A Thousand desires like this one (2003), 99, 139 Hadkar, Ashirwad, 24, 26 Haksar, Anamika, 3, 4, 6–9, 14, 94 Hamsafar Trust, 60 Haneke, Michael, 147, 164, 170 Hansen, Thom Blom, 202 Hanssen, Kristin, 377 Harbord, Janet, 111, 132 Hark, Ina Rae, 290 Hartman, Saidiya, 375 Hassan, Kamal, 18, 231 Hathyar (1989), 220, 258 Havana Film School, 304 Haynes, Todd, 298 Hazarika, Bhaskar, 67, 94 Heidkamp, Birte, 84 Helleman, Monte, 277 The Hema Commission Report, 392 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 373 Heredia, Shai, 8, 44, 49, 93, 311 Hi-8, 15, 16, 18, 76 High Definition (HD), 21, 122 High Definition Video (HDV), 19, 20, 28, 398, 403 High dynamic range imaging (HDR), 25, 28 Hill, Douglas, 132 Hindustan, 100, 166 Hindustani, 27, 165, 300, 325, 326 Hindustan Photo Films , 55 Hirani, Rajkumar, 61 Hirshhorn Museum, 71, 373 Histoire(s) du cinema (2011), 128 Hitchcock, Alfred, 236, 259, 283, 361, 365 Hoffmann, Kay, 72

448

INDEX

Holly, Michael Ann, 111, 132 Hollywood, 19, 112, 113, 141, 176, 187, 201, 203, 270, 278, 298 Hollywood Reporter, 80, 398, 408 home movies, 66, 128 Honeymoon Travelers Pvt. Ltd. (2007), 397 Hood, John W., 367 Hopper, Dennis, 277, 295 Horak, Jan-Christopher, 366 horror films, 51, 55, 61, 126, 181, 187, 242 Hoskote, Ranjit, 131 Hou, Hsiao-hsien, 149, 170 Housefull (1999), 220 How the West was Won (USA, 1962), 240, 258 Hranitzky, Ágnes, 95, 145, 171 Hubert Bals Foundation, 144, 147, 150 Hudson, Dale, 79, 81, 164 Hughes, Stephen, 245, 254 Huhtamo, Erkki, 130 Hulsing, Milan, 81 Human Trail Pictures, 66 Hungryalist, 328, 334, 337, 374 Hüppauf, Bernd, 120, 134 Hyderabad, 19, 29, 37, 112, 165, 179, 181, 367, 371 Hyder, Syed Akbar, 7, 72, 369, 379

I I am not a witch (2017), 7, 93 ID (2012), 58, 60 Ilayaraja, 17 Ilayaraja, Bhavatharini, 402 I live in Behrampada (1993), 41, 42 imperfect cinema, 43, 79 impure cinema, 6, 56, 72 Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 92, 277, 295

In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978), 129 Indian Administrative Service (IAS), 48 Indian Express , 99 Indian Panorama, 45, 308 Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), 405 Indian Women Cinematographers’ Collective (IWCC), 21, 392, 393, 404 Indu, 54, 55 intermediality/intermedial, 6, 10, 15, 74, 118, 119, 123, 219, 229, 232, 236–38, 254, 267, 271, 272, 276–78, 280, 319, 323, 337 International Criminal Court at The Hague, 39 International Film Festival, Rotterdam (IFFR), 218 internet, 166, 284, 289, 352, 402 interval, 145, 181, 182, 196, 199, 204, 220, 221, 234, 235, 250, 322, 342, 343, 405 In the Forest Hangs a Bridge (1999), 33, 93 In the Shadow of the Cobra (2004), 19, 20, 93 Iordanova, Dina, 141, 160 iPhone, 65, 66 Ishizuka, Karen I., 128 Islam, 340, 346, 367, 368, 379 Is Raat Ke Subhah Nahin/The Long Night (1996), 177 Ivan (2002), 19, 93, 402 J Jaadui Machchhi, 405 Jaane Kya Tune Kahi (2011), 34, 93 Jaffe, Ira, 69, 85, 146, 163, 164 Jaffrelot, Christophe, 79 Jai Bhim Comrade (2011), 147, 170

INDEX

Jain, Anuja, 78, 151, 165 Jain, Kajri, 380 Jain, Nishtha, 155, 393–95, 409 Jain, Smriti Nevatia, 395 Jalal Shah Fakir, 344–46 Jama Masjid, 7 Jamia Millia Islamia University, 11 Janmadhinam (1997/1998), 8 Janve, Ridham, 58 Jaoon Kahan Bata Ae Dil (2018), 156, 170 Jarmusch, Jim, 179, 206, 275, 290, 295, 296 Jar Pictures, 45, 61 Jatra, 306, 325, 329, 363 Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), 48, 79, 175 Jayakar, Pupul, 306 Jayalalitha, 17, 399 Jayamanne, Laleen, 286, 296, 371 Jayaraman, Preetha, 397 Jayasankar, K.P., 80, 379 Jaydev, 62 Jaypal, Vijay, 243 Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), 164, 170 Jenkins, Barry, 243, 259 Jenkins, Henry, 235, 236, 252 Jenkins, Tricia, 162 Jeong, Seung-hoon, 142, 161 Jerslev, Anne, 6, 71, 81 Jhamu Sugandh Productions, 45 Jodhaa Akbar (2008), 32, 93 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 286 John and Jane (2005), 41, 57, 81 Johnny Gaddaar/Johnny the Traitor (2007), 192, 198–200, 206 Johnny Guitar (1954), 195, 206 Johnny Mera Naam (1970), 195, 198, 199 Johnny Mnemonic (1995), 195, 206

449

Jonaki (2018), 38, 93, 164, 170 Joseph, Asha Achi, 392 Joseph, Josephine, 369 Joseph, Sunny, 59, 155, 262, 264, 291, 295 Joshi, Ruchir, 33, 92, 94, 303, 321, 322, 333, 375 Josson, Suma, 8, 29, 40, 72, 92, 93, 170, 372 July, Miranda, 298 Ju-on (2002), 61, 93

K Kaal Abirathi (1989), 49, 93, 327 Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gam (2001), 32 Kagti, Reema, 397, 409 Kahini (1997), 13, 66, 93, 262–64, 267, 269, 271–73, 275–77, 284, 286, 288, 295 Kahlon, Rajkamal, 97, 130 Kailasam, 245–47, 403 Kailasam, Vasugi, 253 Kak, Sanjay, 33, 93, 377 Kala Bazaar (1960), 198 Kala Paani (1958), 198 Kaleka, Ranbir, 27, 71 Kali, 308, 325–27, 351, 357 Kali, Sundar, 218, 250 Kallingal, Rima, 392 Kallukkul Eeram/Moisture inside stone (1980), 218 Kalyan, Rohan, 134, 135, 192, 193, 195, 199 Kamal, K.M., 58, 60, 62 Kamatipaadam (2016), 225, 258 Kamlabai (1992), 33, 93 Kanchenjungha (1962), 154, 170 Kannada, 13, 155, 212, 245, 248, 262, 307 Kannada New Wave Cinema, 212 Kannadasan, 247

450

INDEX

Kanwar, Amar, 350 Kapadia, Asif, 396, 409 Kapoor, Raj, 354 Kapur, Geeta, 335, 376 Kapur, Shekhar, 63, 114 Karmakar, Shyamal, 395, 409 Karpouzoglou, Timothy, 138 Karthick, Arun, 38, 94, 244, 259 Karthik Subbaraj, 212, 213, 242 Kasaravalli, Girish, 131, 139, 171 Kashyap, Anurag, 45–47, 57, 60, 61, 82, 92–94, 143, 161, 171, 189–92, 204, 206, 207, 226, 227, 241, 258 Katha Film Circle, 44 Kathir, S.R., 215–18, 222–26, 250, 251 Kattradhu Tamizh (2007), 217 Kattumaram (2019), 18, 93 Kaul—A Calling (2016), 24, 155, 171 Kaul, Mani, 27, 33, 49, 56, 92, 94, 150, 151, 155, 156, 159, 165, 171, 300, 304, 305, 307, 350, 361, 371, 372 Kazhcha Film Forum, 13, 66, 284 Keluskar, Aadish Vikas, 24, 155–59, 170, 171, 406, 409 Kerala, 23, 29, 58, 59, 63, 242, 248, 262, 263, 285, 288, 307, 310, 391, 392, 403 Kergel, David, 84 Khanaur/Bitter Chestnut (2019), 150 Khejmat Fakir, 343 Khopkar, Arun, 329 Khosa, Rajan, 332 Khosla ka Ghosla (2006), 44, 93 Khosla, Raj, 170, 176, 206 Khullar, Sonal, 369 Kiarostami, Abbas, 10, 274–76, 295, 296, 300, 315, 368 Kidaari (2016), 227, 258

Kinder, Marsha, 10, 74, 220, 221, 250, 276, 361 King, Homay, 110, 131 Kings of the Road (1976), 275, 296 Kishore, Avijit Mukul, 115, 133 Kitsch Mitsch (1995), 329, 331 Kittler, Friedrich, 269, 291 Knight, Lisa, 378 Kodak, 31, 33, 34, 36, 54, 55, 238 Kodak Super 16mm, 216 Koepnick, Lutz P., 163 Koormavatara (2011), 131, 139 Kovács, András Bálint, 311, 324, 373 Kredell, Brendan, 160 Kriitiban, 328 Krishnan, Rajan Kurai, 215, 245, 249 Kubrick, Stanley, 166, 195, 206 Kuckertz, Josef, 378 Kumar, Pankaj Rishi, 42, 48 Kutti Japan/Children of Mini-Japan (1990), 310 Kuttrame Thandanai/Crime Itself is Punishment (2016), 244, 258 L labs Filmcenter Laboratory, 38 Prime Focus Lab, 24, 26 processing labs, 23, 34, 53, 180, 333 Lagaan (2001), 32, 93, 128 La Haine (1995), 218, 258 Lahiri, Bappi, 230, 231 Lahore Biennale, 261 Lajwanti (2014), 31, 35, 93 Lakshmi and Me (2007), 395, 396, 409 Lalit Kala Akademi, 398 Lalon Fakir, 344, 347, 348, 364 Lamarre, Thomas, 71, 130 La Muerte de un Burócrata/Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), 145, 171

INDEX

Lang, Fritz, 176 Langlois, Georges P., 366 Langlois, Henri, 297, 366 La Notte (1961), 320 ‘laptop film’, 29 laptops, 24, 65, 67, 113, 155, 159, 276, 278 Las Acacias (2011), 275, 296 The Last Act (2012), 57, 82, 94 Last Year at Marienbad (1961), 317 L’Avventura (1960), 320 Lawder, Standish D., 71 Lêba, Diêmchi, 401 Le Chant des Fous/Songs of the Madmen (1979), 334 L’Eclisse (1962), 320 Lee, Ang, 149, 170 Lehman, Peter, 131 Leighton Pierce, 247 Lenin Rajendran, 61 lens 18mm, 36 35mm, 35, 36 anamorphic lens, 120, 188, 359 Angénieux zoom lens, 396 Cooke Lens s4i, 37 fisheye lens, 187, 188 Hawk, 35 Zeiss and Cooke, 21 Zeiss Mark 3, 35, 37, 38 Zeiss Master Primes, 144 Lens (2016), 66, 94 Lensight: A Technical Journal for the Celluloid and Electronic Media Professionals , 31 Le Petit Soldat (1963), 110, 139 Les Cahiers du Cinema, 62, 84 Les Maîtres Fous (1954), 286, 296 Leyda, Jey, 129, 131 Library of Congress/Motion Pictures Library, 129 Liebniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 120

451

Lie, Nadia, 290 Life is a Miracle (2004), 275, 296 light exposures, 23 Lim, Song Hwee, 146, 147, 163 Linear Tape-Open (LTO) tape, 77 L’Internationale, 5 Linux, 12 Littau, Karin, 72, 85, 254, 255 Littín, Miguel, 59, 92 Loist, Skadi, 141, 160 Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018), 149 Look Up Table (LUTS), 36 Lorea, Carola Erika, 378 Lost works, 13, 46, 68, 69, 127, 200, 329–31 Love’s Labour (2014), 38 Love in India (2009), 365 Love Sex Aur Dhoka/Love, Sex, and Betrayal (2011), 28 Lowenstein, Adam, 73, 281, 291, 292 The Lunchbox (2013), 241, 258 Luneau, George, 334 The Lure (2015), 354 Lu, Sheldon H., 239, 252, 292 Lütgert, Sebastian, 42 Lynch, David, 121, 275, 296, 366 Lyotard, Jean-François, 262, 287, 290, 291 M MacDonald, Scott, 154, 163, 166, 254, 292 Made in India (2002), 39, 94 Madras noir, 237 Madurai, 210, 215, 216, 221, 222, 227, 249, 252 Magnetic Tapes/Sony Magnetic Tapes, 77 Mahabharata, 354 Mahajan, K.K., 125, 251, 339, 394, 395

452

INDEX

Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, 59 Mahendra, Balu, 213, 241, 242, 259, 375 Mahmood, Putul, 310, 331, 332, 352, 353, 359, 372, 379 Mahmood, Rafey, 324, 339, 358, 359, 363 Maitreya, Yogesh, 164 Majlis, 40–42 Majumdar, Dipak, 303, 328–30, 332, 337, 342 Majumdar, Neepa, 128 Majumdar, Rochana, 370 Malabou, Catherine, 165 Malaiyoor Mambattiyan (1983), 231, 258 Malayalam, 13, 20, 29, 147, 225, 227, 242, 262, 264, 391, 398, 403 Malick, Terrence, 112, 140, 366 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 377 Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005), 14, 94, 99, 128, 129, 139 Mangolte, Babette, 78 Manikandan, M., 212, 213, 241, 244, 253, 258 Manipur, 68 Manjrekar, Mahesh, 189, 207 Manjule, Nagraj, 156, 170 Mannaki, 104 Manovich, Lev, 10, 71, 73, 74, 117, 220 Mansoor Fakir, 343, 344 Manthopoo Killiye (1979), 215, 258 Maqbool (2003), 180, 189, 206 Marchetti, Gina, 97, 133, 324, 374 Marclay, Christian, 232, 270, 380 Marfat, 342–44, 346–48, 360, 364 Marion, Phillipe, 73, 373 Marks, Laura U., 298, 300, 315, 367, 368, 373

Marnie (1964), 236, 259 Martin, Adrian, 134, 239, 253 Martin-Jones, David, 85, 299, 300, 367 The Master (2012), 56, 94 Max Muller Bhavan, 304 Maya Darpan (1972), 125, 139 Mazhaar (Holy Tomb), 344–46 Mazierska, Ewa, 290 Mazumdar, Hemen/Hemendernath, 354 Mazumdar, Ranjani, 79, 133, 143, 161, 177, 189, 191, 203, 204 ‘Urban Fringe’, 189 McNeill, Isabelle F., 72, 74 McPherson, Tara, 74 Mead, Margaret, 336 media archaeology, 51, 130, 292 Media Classic, 46, 189–91, 329 media lab, 12, 13 Media Lab, Jadavpur, 43 mediascape, 11, 15, 19, 40, 53, 113, 115, 119, 186, 187, 191, 214, 219, 232, 243 Media Storm, 350 Medina, 346 Meher Ali Shah, 344 Mehsampur (2018), 57, 82, 83, 94 Mehta, Anil, 32, 37, 251, 339 Mehta, Ashok, 302 Mehta, Hansal, 28, 92, 116, 133, 139, 206 Mehta, Kabir, 57, 81, 92 Mehta, Ketan, 14, 18, 94, 99, 112, 131, 139 Menon, Anjali Ela, 399 Menon, Archana, 60 Mermaid (1896–97), 354 #Metoo, 392, 397, 398 Metz, Christian, 118, 156, 287, 347, 355, 356, 378 MGR, 17

INDEX

Michelson, Annette, 326, 373, 374 Microsoft, 12 Mi, Jiayan, 253, 292 Minding the Gap (2018), 14, 68, 97, 139 Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B), 49, 59, 62, 103, 130, 310, 392 Mint , 46 Minz, Anupama, 393 Mirch Masala (1982), 99, 139 Mirror (1975), 7, 94, 271, 296 Mirza, Karen, 372 Mirza, Saeed, 41, 42, 94, 95, 252 mise en scène, 16, 29, 31, 53, 58, 60, 102, 109, 124–27, 134, 177, 187, 192, 210, 214, 218, 219, 229, 239, 240, 242, 243, 253, 270, 285, 308, 315, 323, 328, 342, 344, 351, 361, 362, 364, 370 Mishra, Pankaj, 202 Mishra, Pratik, 138 Mishra, Sudhir, 99, 139, 177, 206 Mission Kashmir (2000), 113, 139, 234, 259 Miss Lovely (2012), 24, 50–52, 55–58, 81, 82, 241, 259 Mistry, Fali, 154 Mitra, Hiran, 329, 375 Mitra, Mandira, 332 Mitra, Rana, 308, 309, 372 Mitra, Subrata, 18, 154, 263, 395 Mitr, my friend (2002), 19, 93, 401, 402, 409 mobile, 65, 67, 113, 120, 183, 198, 218, 261, 280 Moca Club, 44 modernist, 164, 214, 270, 312, 317, 319, 324, 335, 358, 360 Mohanan, K.U., 24, 33, 55, 82, 155, 251, 339

453

Mohandas, Geethu, 60 Mohan, Jag, 103, 105, 129, 130 Mohan, Reena, 33, 93, 251 Mohanty, Kabir, 75, 332 Mohapatra, Sona, 397, 398, 408 Moin, A. Azfar, 379 Möller, Olaf, 240, 253 MOMA, New York, 8, 79, 110, 131 Monani, Salma, 292 Money Money (1995), 206 Monsanto, 12, 58 Monteiro, Anjali, 80, 379 Monteiro, Lucia Ramos, 239, 253 Moondram Pirai (1982), 231, 259 Moonlight (2016), 243, 259 Mor Mann Ke Bharam/An Illusion of My Mind (2015), 405, 409 Moses, 354 Moveable Fest , 54, 81 movement, 4, 5, 10, 18, 36, 45, 59, 83, 100, 102, 103, 107, 109, 118, 119, 121, 132, 144, 148, 151, 158, 163, 178, 180, 183, 184, 187, 189, 213, 215, 217, 218, 225, 229, 234, 236, 238, 245, 247, 262, 263, 267, 280, 283, 286, 289, 319, 343, 350, 354, 356, 359, 360, 368, 373, 375, 393, 397, 399, 401 Mr. & Mrs. ’55 (1955), 179, 323 Mudhal Mudhal Mudhal Varai/M3V (2009), 19, 93 Mughal, 7, 281, 379 Mukharji, Manjita, 378 Mukherjee, Barun, 33 Müller, Marco, 63 Mullum Malarum (1978), 17 multiplex theatres, 46, 214 Mulvey, Laura, 10, 74, 117, 130, 133, 158, 159, 166, 283 Mumbai’s Digital Academy, 3

454

INDEX

Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), 56, 115, 133, 273, 283 Mumbai Express (2005), 18, 93 Mumble Core, 28 Munch, Edvard, 354, 379 Muralidharan, C.K., 33 Murattu Kaalai (1980), 215, 219, 221, 259 Murthy, Mamta, 68, 93 Murthy, V.K., 179 Museum of Contemporary Art, 122 Myrent, Glenn, 366 Myskkin, 212, 241 mystical, 7, 36, 341, 347, 368

N Nachom-ia Kumpasar/Let’s Dance to the Rhythm (2014), 406 Naficy, Hamid, 70, 85, 298, 367 Nagib, Lúcia, 6, 71, 72, 81 Nagmoti (1983), 327 Nair, Bindu, 401 Nair, P.K., 59, 84, 129, 372 Nair, Shivam, 189, 190, 204, 206 Najrul Fakir, 347 Nalan Kumarasamy, 212, 213, 227, 242, 252 Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005), 41, 94 Nanavati Commission, 166 Nandan Film and Culture Centre, 302 Nandy, Pritish, 45 Nandy, Subhash, 369 Naraindas, Harish, 367, 374, 379 Narain, Vishal, 138 Narayanan, Kalpana, 369 Narayanan, Mahesh, 29, 94, 242 Narayan, R.K. Guide, 195 Naremore, James, 176, 201 Naria, Bipan Chandra, 35

Naseem (1995), 41, 94 Nasir (2020), 38, 94, 259 Nasta, Dominique, 83, 162 National Archives, Washington DC, 111, 129, 310 National Awards, 20, 38, 56, 202, 252, 264, 302, 304, 305, 309, 341, 378 National Film Archive (NFAI), 59, 62, 129, 130, 251, 309–11, 372, 399 National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), 27, 49, 142, 283, 302, 304, 305, 330 National Public Radio (NPR), 54, 81 National School of Drama (NSD), 14 Navert, 16 Navketan Films, 198 Ndalianis, Angela, 7, 53, 72, 81, 222, 250 Neale, Steve, 141, 142, 160 Neelakandan, Madhu, 58, 61 Negrito tribes, 306 neo-baroque, 7, 250 neorealism, 125, 145, 230, 263, 326, 327, 350 Netflix, 25, 28, 38, 63, 159, 243, 284, 285 NETPAC Award, 62 Nichols, Bill, 335, 376, 377 Nietzsche, 159 Night on Earth (1991), 275, 290, 296 Nihalani, Govind, 18, 217, 249, 252, 258, 259 Nikkatsu, 55, 201 Ninaivellam Nithya (1982), 230 1917 (2019), 38, 92 Nirgudkar, Ujjwal, 38 Nivart Films, 285 noir

INDEX

Bombay Noir, 46, 58, 70, 143, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181, 188, 192, 200, 202, 329 East Asian Noir, 176, 201 existential noir, 180 French noir, 176 Global Noir, 176, 203 historical noir, 176 Hong Kong Neo-Noir, 176, 201, 203 Kowloon Noir, 176, 201 Mumbai Noir, 329 neo-noir, 28, 46, 126, 127, 143, 176, 180, 189, 201, 214, 217, 227, 229, 230, 237, 239, 240, 253, 270 Nikkatsu Noir, 176 sunny noir, 189 tech-noir, 176 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 304, 401 non-governmental organization (NGO) films, 339 No Smoking (2007), 143, 171, 191, 206 Notes from the Underground, 330 nouveau roman, 8 Nyoni, Rungano, 7, 93 O Oberoi, Ruchika, 393 O’Brien, Elaine, 374 observational documentary, 144, 146–48, 330, 337, 356 October (1928), 326 The Oil of the 21st Century, 42. See also Gerber, Jan; Lütgert, Sebastian Oldboy (2003), 271, 296 Old Testament, 354 Oli Vilakku (1968), 17, 94 Oliyum Oliyum, 219

455

Om Dar Be Dar (1988), 44 On Cannibalism (1994), 7, 94 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), 275, 296 online streaming, 9, 106, 354 Only God Forgives (2013), 240, 259 Open Platform for Unlimited Signification (OPUS), 12 Openshaw, Jeanne, 378 Open Source, 42, 232 optical, 34, 35, 55, 106, 182, 183, 188, 224 Oraalppokkam/Six Feet High (2014), 284, 296 Orissa, 264, 330, 331 orphaned works, 9 Oru Thalai Ragam (1980), 219 Oscars, 67, 162, 202 Ozu, Yasujiro, 154, 312 P Paadum Vaanampadi (1985), 230, 259 Paanch (2003), 45, 94, 143, 171, 191, 207 Pacific Film Archive (PFA), 68, 209, 210, 240, 248 pad.ma, 39, 42, 79 Public Access Digital Archive, 39, 42 Paglen, Trevor, 289 Paik, Nam June, 29 Pairon Talle/Soul of Sand (2010), 124–26, 139 Paisa Vasool (2004), 199, 207 Pakistan, 11, 104, 105, 397 Palit, Ranjan, 24, 26, 33, 37, 66, 94, 165, 180, 202, 251, 329, 332, 333, 339, 363, 377, 378 Pamuk, Orhan, 61 Panavision, 35 Pande, Mrinal, 305

456

INDEX

Pandian, Anand, 77, 214, 215, 245, 249, 254 Pandian, M.S.S., 245, 254, 399, 408 Panikkar, Shivaji, 399 panorama, 45, 107, 108, 130, 238, 261, 278, 280, 323 Paperboat studios, 3 Parajanov, Sergei, 7, 92 Parente, André, 292 Parinda (1989), 176, 177, 180, 189, 191, 202, 207, 224, 251, 252, 259 Park, Chan-wook, 240, 271, 296 Parol (2008), 284, 296 Parry, Jonathan, 379 Parthiban, 19, 93, 220, 258 Paruthiveeran (2007), 209, 210, 227, 251, 259 Parwana (1971), 195, 199, 207 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 326, 352, 370 Passenger (1975), 320 Past, Elena, 134 Pather Panchali (1955), 297 Pathy, P.V., 105, 130 Patkar, Medha, 60 Pattachitra, 306, 329 Patwardhan, Anand, 33, 92, 147, 170, 203, 206, 334, 350 Paul, Bina, 8, 251, 402 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 130 Pellisery, Lijo Jose, 242 Penley, Constance, 74, 201, 252 Perez, Jorgé, 290 Persia/Persian, 7, 11, 343 personal films, 26 Perzynski, ´ Bogdan, 3, 131, 379 Petersen, Julie K., 293 Peterson, Lowell, 202 Peth˝ o, Ágnes, 10, 74, 145, 148, 162, 163 Petrini, Carlo, 163 Peucker, Brigitte, 145, 162

Phool Aur Patthar (1966), 17, 94 Phoring/Dragonfly (2013), 25 photographs, 40, 76, 100, 101, 108, 111, 144, 198, 272, 282, 289, 369 Pichinto, 325, 326 Pickpocket (1959), 6, 94 Pierce, Leighton, 247 Pierson, Michele, 73 Pillai, Swarnavel Eswaran, 15–18, 75, 76, 92–94, 240–45, 249, 251, 253, 254, 258, 300 Pines, Jim, 79, 366 Pir Alam Baba, 344, 345 Piravi (1989), 155, 171, 248, 259, 262–64, 296 Pisters, Patricia, 73 Pixar, 25 pixilation, 56, 115, 233, 323 Pixion, 34 Place, Janey, 202 Plunder Road (1957), 278, 296 Polanski, Roman, 361 Police Lockup (1993), 361 Pookutty, Resul, 58, 61 Poole, Deborah, 163 Pothan, Dileesh, 147, 171 Pothigai Malai (Pillai and Freccia, 1995), 16, 94 Prabhat Studio, 58 Pradhan, Binod, 25, 180, 251 Prakash, V.K., 20, 93, 105, 193–99, 274–79, 281, 282, 289, 409 Prasad, Babu Eshwar, 13, 93, 295 Prasad Lab/Prasad Corporation, 15, 25, 62, 77, 240, 306 Prasad, M. Madhava, 125, 134, 142, 161, 162, 201, 370, 371 Prasad, Sudha Kongara, 402 Prasath Murugesan, 227, 258 Pratikriya (1990), 154, 171 Prayoga Cinema, 48

INDEX

Precarity Lab, 84 Prime Focus/Prime Focus Lab, 24, 26, 34, 116 Prisoners of Conscience (1978), 350 Priyadarshan, 147, 171 Producers Guild of America (PGA), 20 projection, 14, 15, 26, 27, 35, 59, 99, 109–11, 113, 125, 188, 212, 220, 228, 236, 247, 261, 269–71, 315, 317, 322, 403, 406, 407 Projectorhead, 55, 80 Prophet, 344–46 Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), 21, 75, 378 pure cinema, 228, 247, 326 Purewal, Navtej K., 83 puzzle films, 413 PVR Cinemas, 63, 155 Pye, Douglas, 163 pyrotechnics, 112, 262 Q Q, 47, 226, 365 Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (1988), 94 Quattracento, 281 Qube Cinema Technologies, 19 ¡Que Viva México! (1930/1979), 309 Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt, 378 R Raakh/Ashes to Ashes (1989)/Raakh Redux, 177, 178, 207 Rabindra Sangeet, 348 Radhakrishnan, Ratheesh, 253 Raghavan, Sridhar, 189 Raghavan, Sriram, 46, 189–95, 204, 206, 207, 227, 252 Raha, Kironmoy, 371 Rahman, A.R., 232, 397

457

Rai, Amit, 80, 113 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 27, 77, 125, 134, 366, 371 Rajagopal, Arvind, 79 Rajinikanth/Rajinikanth, Soundarya, 80, 213, 215, 219, 231, 234, 248 Ralang Road, 405, 409 Ram, 218, 240, 241, 258 Ramachandran, Naman, 47, 80, 283, 398 Ramakrishnan, Nisha, 34 Ramani, R.V., 251, 332 Ramani, Sudarshan, 52, 53, 55, 80, 81, 247, 306, 307, 329 Raman, Shankar, 126, 139 Ramnath, Nandini, 43–46, 133, 274, 291, 398, 408 Ramoji Film City, Hyderabad, 19 Ranade, Soumitra, 3, 71 Rana, Rashid, 282 Rancière, Jacques, 72 Rangan, Baradwaj, 230, 252 Rangeela (1995), 181, 207, 220, 259 Ranu (2001), 395, 396, 409 Raqs Media Collective/Raqs’ show Measuring Time, 10, 14, 75, 291 Rascaroli, Laura, 134, 290, 334, 335, 338, 352, 375, 377 Rashomon (1950), 317 Rath, Arun, 54, 81 ratio, 180, 372 aspect ratio, 7, 9, 27, 102, 115, 264, 269 shooting ratio, 16, 31, 150, 191 Ratnam, Mani, 19, 40, 45, 72, 76, 92–94, 161, 199, 203, 206, 207, 241, 248, 358, 402, 409 Ravan Naach, 330 Ravetto-Biagioli, Kriss, 159, 166, 251, 374 Ravindran, Nirmala, 128

458

INDEX

Ravi, Rajeev, 58, 60, 61, 225, 227, 258 Ray, Sangeeta, 163 Ray, Satyajit, 18, 154, 166, 170, 263, 264, 297, 298, 302, 303, 305, 307, 322, 329, 370, 372 Rear Window (1954), 361 Recyclewallah, 50 Red Desert (1964), 124, 134, 139 Reddy, Ram, 38, 95 Reddy, Sita, 97 Reed, Carol, 360 Refn, Nicolas Wending, 240, 259 Reichsautobahn (1986), 278, 296 Remes, Justin, 374 Renoir, Jean, 263, 370 Renov, Michael, 166 Resnais, Alain, 271 La Jetée (1962), 360 Last Year at Mariendbad (1961), 360 resolution, 24, 65, 148, 237, 245, 262, 363 low-resolution, 115, 156 Revathi, 19, 93, 402, 409 Revelations (2016), 243, 259 Reygadas, Carlos, 286 Rhizome, 11–13, 75 Rhodes, Cecil John, 328 Rhodes, John David, 134, 149, 164 Rhyne, Ragan, 160 Rich, Nathan, 135 Rii, 48, 352, 355, 361, 365 ripped films, 9 Road Movie, 13, 66, 69, 155, 160, 261, 262, 264, 267, 272–78, 280, 284, 285, 287–91, 357 Roberge, Gaston, 303, 329 Robinson, Andrew, 166, 372 Rogers, Ariel, 73 Roja (1992), 17, 94 Romanian cinema, 22, 83, 145, 162

Romney, Jonathan, 163 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 7, 94, 286, 293 Roopkala Kendro, 303, 370 Rosen, Philip, 291 Ross, Miriam, 162 Rouch, Jean, 18, 286, 296, 336, 376 Roxborough, Scott, 80 Roychoudhury, Bipalab, 302 Roychowdhry, Indranil, 25, 94 Rubber (2010), 277, 296 Rupayan Lab, 302 Russell, Catherine, 232, 252, 286, 293, 335, 336, 376 Russian Cultural Centre, 304 Rust, Stephen, 292 S Saat Khoon Maaf/Seven Sins (2010), 180, 207 Sabuth/Proof (2019), 395, 396 Saito, Stephen, 54, 55, 81 Salt, Barry, 75 Saluja, Renu, 224, 251 Sameeksha, 58 Samudhrakani, 213 Sanders-Brahms, Helma, 401 Sanjai, P.R., 80 Santner, Eric L., 373 Sarai, 11–13 Sashikumar, T.K., 61 Sasidharan, Sanal Kumar, 13, 66, 283–86, 288, 296 Sasikumar, M., 210, 211, 213, 215, 216, 218, 224, 225, 227, 249 satellite/satellite TV, 29, 116, 118, 119, 133, 182, 191, 289 Satya (1998), 45, 177, 181, 190, 203, 207, 220, 259, 354 Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), 20, 21, 23, 245, 303, 370, 403

INDEX

Satz, Aura, 163 Scheherazade, 7 Schiesari, Nancy, 130 Schilt, Thibaut, 290 Schoonover, Karl, 366 Scorsese, Martin, 190, 207 Scott, Ridley, 277, 296 screenings, 13, 15, 28, 48, 59, 63, 67–69, 113, 159, 220, 241, 242, 288, 297, 303, 304, 307–10, 328, 333, 341, 351, 354, 369, 373 theatrical, 98, 101, 339 scroll.in, 46, 133, 291, 398, 408 Seeta aur Gita (1972), 361 Seetharaman, G., 129 Selvaraghavan, K., 210, 211, 214, 231, 258 Sen, Aparna, 302, 369 Sengupta, Aditya Vikram, 38, 93, 94, 148, 164, 170, 171 Sen, Mrinal, 125, 139, 302, 304, 305, 307, 309, 369 Sensory Ethnography Lab, 163 Sen, Sudipta, 368 serial killer films, 180, 190, 200, 202 Šeši´c, Rada, 398 Setu, 24 Seven Invisible Men (2005), 275, 296 7 Islands and a Metro (2006), 42, 92 Sexy Durga (2018), 13, 94 Shahini, Kumar, 49, 125, 134, 300, 304, 305, 307, 350, 370–72 Shah, Kundan, 252, 258, 309 Shah, Piyush, 21–29, 38, 77, 95, 155, 251, 332, 339 Shaji Kuran, 155, 262, 264, 296 Shakti, 326 Shantiniketan, 340, 373, 399 Shariat, 347, 348, 350, 351, 364 Sharma, Bakul, 397 Sharma, Shlok, 66

459

Sharma, Surabhi, 393 Sheikh, Ghulammohammed, 39 Shergill, Rabbi, 397 Shigehiko, Hasumi, 166 Shi, Mahadeb, 332, 333 Shin, Chi-Yun, 201 Ship of Theseus (2012), 29, 45, 50, 51, 63, 94 Shiva (1989), 179, 202, 207 Shivkumar, Rohan, 133 Shodh (1981), 302 Sholay (1975), 181, 200, 207 Shulgin, Alexei, 6 Shut Up Sona (2019), 397, 398, 407–9 Siddheshwari (1990), 27, 29, 94, 165 Siddheswari, 27 Siddiqui, Nawaz, 56 Sight and Sound, 47, 192 Silandhi/Spider (2008), 19, 94, 403, 409 Sila Samyangalil/Sometimes (2018), 147 SIM card, 65 The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), 26 Singh, Gurvinder, 83, 92, 150–53, 159, 165, 170, 371 Singh, Pritam, 83 Singh, Pushpendra, 31, 35–37, 92, 93 Sinha, Arvind, 332 Sircar, Badal, 324, 374 Sitney, P. Adams, 373, 376 Sivan, Santosh, 180, 251 Sivapuranam/The Strange Case of Shiva (2015), 244 Sivathamby, Karthigesu, 245, 254 16 Vayathinile (1977), 231, 258 Six Yards to Democracy (2006), 395, 409 slow-motion, 29, 110, 218, 223, 224, 234–36, 272, 355

460

INDEX

slow, 34, 53, 57, 58, 69, 70, 102, 110, 125, 128, 145–47, 156, 158–60, 163, 164, 188, 194, 214, 238, 239, 243, 252, 262, 276, 283, 286, 297, 299, 311, 354, 361, 403, 407 slow food, 163 Slumdog Millionaire (2008), 232, 259 Smithsonian, 116 Sobchack, Vivian, 73 software, 12, 23, 41, 402 Solanas, Fernando, 43, 79 Solaris (1972), 7, 94, 281, 296, 315 Soman, K.G., 31, 32, 78 song and dance sequence, 128, 161, 219, 220, 233, 234, 354, 355, 362 Song of Ceylon (1934), 286, 296 Sony DCR-VX2000 mini camcorder, 15 Sony DSR 500, 114 Sony Hi-8 camera (Sony 3CCD-VX3), 16 Soudhamini, 247, 300, 306, 307, 309, 311, 329, 332, 371, 372 Soviet Union, 275 special effects, 3, 9, 19, 27, 29, 38, 64, 67, 73, 77, 112, 113, 132, 185, 213, 214, 216, 220, 233, 242, 248, 267, 298, 336, 396 The Specialist (1994), 270, 296 Spicer, Andrew, 175 Spiderman, 38 Spieker, Sven, 128 The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), 36, 94 Splice, 303, 308 Spot Boys, 45 Spotlight Films, 45 Srinivasan, Sidharth, 14, 15, 92, 122, 124–26, 139, 186 Sriram, P.C., 19, 402

Srivastava, Sanjay, 135 Staiger, Janet, 160 Stalker (1972), 315 Standing, Guy, 84 Steimatsky, Noa, 326 Steinberg, Leo, 362 Stewart, Garrett, 73 Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma, 366 Stewart, Tony K., 368 Steyerl, Hito, 43, 65, 79, 134 Still Life (2006), 124, 140, 239, 259, 280, 296 Stivale, Charles J., 249 Stoichita, Victor I., 106, 130 Stojanova, Christina, 83 Straight 8 (2005), 85, 128 The Straight Story (1999), 275, 296 Straub and Huillet, 324 Strike (1925), 129, 140, 325 Stringer, Julian, 203 Subramaniam, Shiv, 189 Subramaniapuram (2008), 209, 210, 212, 214, 217–21, 225–27, 242 Suchenski, Richard I., 371 Sufi Sarmad Kashani, 7, 75 Sufi, Sufism, 57, 299, 341, 343, 347, 348, 368, 378 Sugati, Nina, 8, 92 Sukhdev, S., 44 Sukumaran, Ashok, 42 Sultan, Ameer, 210, 213, 227, 259 Sumaithangi (1962), 231, 259 Sumar, Sabiha, 332 Sundaram, Ravi, 11, 12, 75, 78 Sunday (1993), 114, 140 Sundholm, John, 83 Super Deluxe (2019), 213, 243, 259 Surapur, Anand, 397, 409 surrealism, 192, 281, 285–87, 336, 360, 366 surveillance, 28, 65, 185–88, 279, 289, 293

INDEX

Suzuki, Seijun, 179, 201, 206, 207 Branded to Kill (1967), 179, 206 Tokyo Drifter (1966), 179, 207 Swaroop, Kamal, 44, 49, 81, 94, 124, 139, 251 Syriana (2005), 185, 207 Szaniawski, Jeremi, 142, 161 T Tabarna Kathe/Tabara’s Tale (1986), 145 tableau vivant, 7, 9, 145, 147, 163, 325, 326, 331 Taiwan New Cinema, 212 Takapa, Karma, 404, 405, 409 Take Off (2017), 29, 94 Tales from Planet Kolkata (1993), 33, 94 Talwar, Vinod, 55 Tamhane, Chaitanya, 143–48, 162, 170 Tamil New Wave, 29, 47, 56, 58, 68, 127, 209–11, 214, 227 Tamil Progressive Writers Association, 18 Tangerine (2015), 66, 95 Tantric, 57, 299, 326, 343, 357, 368, 379 Tarantino, Quentin, 112, 139, 227, 258 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 7, 94, 247, 271, 281, 296, 315 Tarr, Béla, 50, 95, 145, 148, 163, 171 Taste of Cherry (1997), 275, 276, 296 Tate Modern, 311 Taxi Driver (1976), 190, 207 Technological Broadcast India Fair, 37 Tehelka, 186 Tejada, Roberto, 70, 86, 130, 204, 297, 377, 380 Telegu, 20, 44

461

television, 5, 11, 15, 17, 27–29, 39, 40, 44, 45, 50, 65, 67, 70, 77, 78, 99, 101, 112, 114, 116, 117, 119, 133, 182, 186, 188–91, 196, 198, 199, 212, 213, 219, 223, 229, 231–33, 243, 250, 271, 276, 277, 283, 291, 301, 311, 312, 332, 342, 361, 362, 393, 397, 401, 403 cable television, 15, 29, 44, 114, 118, 246, 329 UTV, 44 televisual, 27, 39–41, 43, 66, 78, 123, 214, 285, 311, 357, 365 10 (2002), 274 Teo, Stephen, 201 Teshigahara, Hiroshi, 59, 95 Thai Veedu/Maternal Home (1983), 230 Thangam (1995), 15–18, 76 Thanikattu Raja (1982), 231 Thapa, Geetanjali, 63 Thapaliyal, Hansa, 393 Thapa, N.S., 102–4, 106 That Girl with Yellow Boots (2010), 192 That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), 361 Thelma and Louise (1991), 277, 290, 296 Thermacol, 24 Thiagarajan Kumararaja, 47, 92, 139, 212, 249, 258, 259, 295 Third Cinema, 43, 79, 298, 317, 366, 406 Third Infinity (2018), 26, 95 The Third Man (1949), 360 36 Chowrighee Lane (1981), 302 Thiruda! Thiruda!/Thief! Thief! (1993), 199 Thithi (2015), 38, 95 Thomas, Rosie, 13, 46, 47, 80

462

INDEX

Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum/The Mainour and the Witness (2017), 147 Time Bomb, 99 Time Out , 43, 46, 47, 66, 80, 391 Time Out Group Pvt. Ltd., 43 Times of India, 100 Tirkit, Iraq, 29 Tirunelveli District, 15 Titash Ekti Nadir Naam/A River Called Titash (1973), 247, 259 Titli (2014) Kumararaja, 127, 140 Tiwari, Sudha, 142, 161 Togawa, Masahiko, 378 Tollygunge, 301 torrented works, 9 Tortajada, Maria, 74 Trance and Dance in Bali, 336 triptych, 50, 281 Trisha, 82 Trivedi, Devdutt, 49–51 Truffaut, Francois, 214, 249, 365, 401 Tsai Ming-liang, 146, 163, 220, 258 Tumbaad (2018), 51, 95 The Turin Horse (2011), 50, 95, 145, 163, 171 Turup (2017), 405, 409 24 City (2008), 124, 139, 239, 258, 281, 295 2D/3D, 149, 235 Two Lane Blacktop (1971), 277, 290, 296 Tyrewala, Abbas, 189, 204 U U-matic, 191, 310, 330 Umberto D (1952), 145, 171 Un Chien Andalou (1929), 275, 281, 293, 296, 325, 361 Under the Green Canopy (1987-88), 306

Ungar, Steven, 164 University of Westminster, 13 The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project (2010), 28, 45, 95 uploaded, 9, 58, 98, 242, 244, 284, 397, 406 Upperstall.com, 46 Urf Professor (2001), 14, 15, 95, 114, 115, 117–21, 140, 397, 409 Ustad Amir Khan, 325 Uttam Kumar, 301 Utterson, Andrew, 73 V Vaastav (1999), 189, 207 Vaidya, Anuj, 175, 209, 210, 248, 249 Vaishnava, 340 V¯ajapey¯ı, Udayana, 165, 371 VALIE EXPORT, 8 Valuthoor, 15, 16, 18 Varadarajan, Siddharth, 79 Varda, Agnès, 277, 295, 296 Variety, 47, 50, 80, 398, 407 Varma, Abhishek, 405, 409 Varma, Ramgopal, 29, 45, 46, 76, 92, 161, 177, 179, 181, 187–90, 192, 199, 203, 206, 207, 220, 259, 354 Vashisht, Mita, 27 Vasudevan, Nitya, 252 Vasudevan, Ravi, 11, 13, 128, 202, 250 VCR, 53, 191 Velayutham, Selvaraj, 245, 254 Veli, 56, 214, 245, 246, 248, 259 Velraj, 213, 259 Venu, K., 33, 58 Vernet, Marc, 197, 202 Vertigo (1958), 361 Vertov, Dziga, 10, 117, 131 Vetri Maaran, 212, 213, 240, 241

INDEX

VHS, 8, 43, 68, 98, 311, 312, 315, 396 Vick, Tom, 133 video, 6, 8, 12, 13, 15, 16, 33, 41, 48, 52, 53, 67, 70, 71, 74, 116, 117, 122, 189–91, 231, 247, 248, 250, 276, 279, 282, 283, 310, 311, 317, 336, 352, 373, 393, 397, 398, 406 High Definition Video (HDV), 19, 20, 28, 398, 403 video art, 6, 9, 10, 29, 69, 71, 373 videocam, 115 video CDs (VCD), 52, 186 video films, 190, 191 video games, 53, 235–37, 271, 272 video parlours, 52, 67, 68 video players, 10, 53, 191 Vijayakanth, 231 Vijay, Vipin, 286 Vij, Ritu, 84 Vij, Sumit, 135 Vikalp (Films for Freedom), 44 Village Rockstars (2017), 67, 95 Vimeo, 67, 98, 141, 155, 285 Vinod, P.S., 238 Viola, Bill, 336 I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986), 336 Virilio, Paul, 188, 203, 292, 374 virtual special effects (VFX), 3, 38 Vithange, Prasanna, 242 Viz Cinemas, 407 Voices from Baliapal (1988), 33, 95 VR cinema/ElseVR, 51 VR documentaries, 51 Vyarawalla, Homai, 104, 111, 131

W Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo, 74 Wages of Fear (1953), 275, 296

463

Walker Art Center, 122 Walker, Michelle Boulous, 163 Walt Disney Productions, 44 Warhol, Andy, 110, 131, 139 Warrior (2001), 396, 409 Warwick, Genevieve, 313, 373 waste, 3, 4, 8, 68, 72, 77, 127, 135, 159, 177 landfill, 127 trash, 121 Waves (2019), 243, 259 website, 201, 253, 352, 354, 356, 404–6 Weeks, Claire, 109 Wees, William, 129 Welles, Orson, 206, 360 Citizen Kane (1941), 204, 206, 360 Wenders, Wim, 273, 275–78, 295, 296 West Bengal Government Film Commission, 304 Whissel, Kristen, 73, 132 Whistling Woods, 34 White, Hayden V., 128 Wikipedia, 144 Willemen, Paul, 79, 366 Williams, Linda, 293 Williams, Tony, 201, 203 Willis, Sharon, 290 Women Filmmakers Manifesto, 401 Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), 391, 392, 404 Woods, Gioia, 375 world cinema, 59, 66, 69, 70, 85, 124, 132, 145, 149, 195, 261, 262, 275, 299, 301, 304, 307, 350, 380 World Social Forum, 42 Wright, Basil, 286, 296 Wright, Craig, 380 www.passionforcinema.com, 46

464

INDEX

Y Yaadon Ki Baaraat (1973), 219 Yaaradi Nee Mohini (2008), 231, 259 Yacavone, Daniel, 293 Yarza, Alejandro, 377, 379 Yau, Esther C.M., 201, 203 Yengde, Suraj, 166 Yesudas, K.J., 231 YouTube, 98, 113, 115, 117, 190, 242, 284 Y tu mamá también (2001), 296 Y2K, 114

YUKT Film Cooperative, 66 Yusufi, Rahat, 154, 171

Z Zanussi, Krzysztof, 264 Zhang, Hongbing, 253 Zhangke, Jia, 124, 139, 140, 239, 253, 258, 259, 280, 295, 296 Zielinski, Siegfried, 119, 133 Zillinger, Martin, 376 Zimmermann, Patricia Rodden, 128