Cinemas of the Global South: Towards a Southern Aesthetics [1 ed.] 1032727470, 9781032727479

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CINEMAS OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH

This book engages with the idea of the Global South through cinema as a concept of resistance; as a space of decolonialisation; and as an arena of virtuality, creativity and change. It opens up a dialogue amongst scholars and filmmakers from the Global South: India, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, and Egypt. The essays in the volume approach cinema as an intertwined process of both production and perception not divorced from the economic, social, political and cultural. They emphasise film as a visual medium where form, structure and content are not separable. Through a wide array of film-readings, the authors explore the concept of a southern cinematic esthetics, in particular, and the concept of the Global South in general. The volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of film and media studies, critical theory, cultural studies and Global South studies. Dilip M Menon is Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand, and Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa. His interests are in knowledge from the Global South, South Asian cultural and intellectual history and oceanic histories. He has edited Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South (2022) and Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought (2023). Amir Taha gained his PhD in English Literature and Cultures from the University of Tübingen in 2017. He is an Associate Researcher at Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Taha taught Film Studies, Cultural Studies and Global South Studies at the University of Tübingen and at Wits University. He is the author of Film and Counterculture in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising (2021) and is the co-editor of the upcoming Cinemas from the Global South. Towards Southern Aesthetics (Routledge).

CINEMAS OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH Towards a Southern Aesthetics

Edited by Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

Designed cover image: Cover Illustration: Adéle Prins, www.prinsdesign.co.za First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The views and opinions expressed in this book are those of author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Routledge. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-15916-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-72747-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-42183-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

CONTENTS

Lists of Figures List of Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements 1 Cinemas of the Global South: Towards A Southern Aesthetics Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

vii x xii

1

2 Southern Aesthetics: The Egyptian Way: Shady Abdelsalam’s The Day of Counting the Years (1969) Amir Taha

23

3 Constellations of Time: Towards a Cartography of Plundered Memories Diego Granja do Amaral

45

4 Singing in Saffron Times: Documentary Film and Resistance to Majoritarian Politics in India Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar

72

5 Local Realism: Indian Independent Film as a Socio-political Medium Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram

107

vi  Contents

6 Indian Gangsters, American Noir and Africa’s Drum Magazine: The Making of a South African Gangster Fliek during Early Apartheid Damon Heatlie 7 Contagious Aesthetics: Bios, Politics and Cinema in Contemporary Kerala Veena Hariharan 8 Dealing with The Precarious City: Violence, Memory and Rhythms of Endurance in La sombra del caminante (Ciro Guerra 2005) & La sociedad del semáforo (Ruben Mendoza, 2010) Luis F. Rosero Amaya 9 Cinematics of Southern Environmentalism A. Chukwudumebi Obute

130

157

180 204

Index 226

FIGURES

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8

Opening credits The ancient Egyptian text Wide shot of Maspero reading the script Introduction of Ahmad Effendi completing the passage Introduction of Maspero The spatial separation between the brother and the elders Close-up of the brother Wanis watching and listening to the revelation of the family secret: visual expression of Wanis’s entrapment 2.9 Wanis’s POV. In the progression of the conflict, Wanis’s brother is now occupying the left half of the frame 2.10 Wanis standing in the narrow stairs revealing a sense of him being trapped 2.11 The elder cuts out the Mummy 2.12 Reaction shot: Wanis’s shock 2.13 The Eye of Horus at the centre of the frame 2.14 Wanis after running from the cave and alone on the top of the mountain 3.1 Sunken ship (02:07) 3.2 Old lady amidst ruins (04:08) 3.3 Debris of Palestinian architecture (04:42) 3.4 Running water (03:25) 3.5 Women’s march (06:08) 3.6 Rissas Studio (06:25)

26 27 27 28 28 33 33 33 34 34 39 40 40 40 52 53 54 55 57 57

viii  Figures

3.7 Displaced Palestinians (15:19) 60 3.8 Palestinian resistance (00:15:44) 61 3.9 Palestinian Cinema institution logo (00:16:48) 62 3.10 Cultural Arts Section (CAS) building in Beirut. Credit: Shlomo Arad 64 3.11 Palestinian protester (21:29–21:30) 66 3.12 Explosion in Beirut, Lebanon (19:14) 67 3.13 Convoy of Palestinian refugees (23:04) 68 4.1 The Oath 77 4.2 RSS street march 78 4.3 Kali salutes 79 4.4 Intertitles 79 4.5 Kali 84 4.6 (a) River Sarayu; (b) Monkey and the Dome 86 4.7 Tea shop 87 4.8 Tea shop discussions 88 4.9 Man with a cell phone 90 4.10 WhatsApp Forward 91 4.11 Two Benches 95 6.1 ‘The Globe Gang’, Drum, July 1956. A dramatic exposé on a feared ‘coloured’ gang from Cape Town in the 1950s 132 6.2 ‘The Malay Mob’, Drum, October 1964. A gang from Fietas in Johannesburg that openly challenged Sherief Khan’s gang for control of illicit activities in the 1960 136 6.3 ‘Township toughs thrash Gangat’, Drum, March 1964. Gangat was allegedly involved in extortion 144 6.4 ‘The “Cop-Proof” Gangster’, Drum, July 1956. Gang supremo Khan was known to be in cahoots with the police 151 7.1 Body bags piling up at the hospital: Screen Grab from Virus (2019) 167 7.2 Closeups frame the makeshift hospital: Screen Grab from Virus 167 7.3 Index Patient Catherine in Contagion (2011): Screen Grab from the film. 168 7.4 Index Patient Zackariya in Virus: Screen Grab from the film. 170 7.5 Index Patient Zackariya photographing a fallen baby bat in Virus: Screen Grab from the film 171 9.1 Establishing shot of the Niger Delta (Black November, 00:00:59) 207 9.2 Establishing shot of Los Angeles (Black November, 00:01:27) 208 9.3 Aerial wide shot of Bhopal (Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, 00:02:27) 209

Figures  ix

9.4 Scene of a leaking pipeline (Black November, 00:14:31) 9.5 Resistant Niger Delta Group Bomb Oil Installation of Western Oil (Black November: 00:55:39) 9.6 MIC Leakage, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, 00:01:07 9.7 Unnamed journalist investigating Union Carbide (Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain: 00:20:03) 9.8 The Voice of Bhopal (Bhopal A Prayer for Rain: 00:32:28)

216 220 222 223 224

CONTRIBUTORS

Diego Granja do Amaral is a postdoctoral fellow in the Postgraduate Program in Communications at Universidade Federal de Sergipe (UFS) in Brazil. He holds a PhD in Global South Studies from the University of Tübingen and a PhD in Communications from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). His doctoral thesis, “Resistance Time: An Atlas of Conflicted Temporalities”, was honoured with the Excellence Prize by Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). His research interests encompass visual culture, memory, film, necropolitics, temporalities, postcoloniality and the Global South. Luis F. Rosero Amaya is PhD candidate at the University of Tübingen (research programme “Entangled Temporalities in the Global South”). His dissertation is entitled “Becoming Subject in the City: Urban Temporalities in the Contemporary Cinemas of Argentina, Brazil and Colombia”. In this ongoing research and other publications, he focuses on the intersections between media, aesthetics and culture. He holds a BA in Humanities (University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), MA in Literature & Cultural Theory (University of Tübingen) and was visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge. Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram is Senior Lecturer in World Cinema at Queen Mary University of London. He is author of India’s New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid (Routledge, 2016), Indian Cinema beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution (Routledge, 2018) and Indian Indies: A Guide to New Independent Indian Cinema (with a foreword by Shabana Azmi) (Routledge, 2022) – the world’s first monograph, edited anthology and condensed guide on new Indian Indie films.

Contributors  xi

Ashvin is Associate Director of the UK Asian Film Festival–London and has directed the UK Heritage Lottery-funded documentary Movies, Memories, Magic (2018). Veena Hariharan is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her essays and articles on documentary, non-fiction cinema and the environment have appeared in anthologies and journals. She is currently Alexander Von Humboldt Fellow at Goethe University, Frankfurt, where she is working on her project on non-human-human entanglements in cinema and new media. Damon Heatlie is a Senior Lecturer at Wits Film and Television at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). He has also taught at the Universities of Cape Town, the Western Cape, and Transkei. He has guest lectured at Arcada University (Helsinki) and Valand Academy (University of Gothenburg). He has an MA in Literary Studies (cum laude) from the University of Cape Town, an MBA from the Wits Business School, and a PhD undertaken at Wits and the University of East Anglia. His doctoral thesis comprised a feature film screenplay and research on South African Indian gangsters during early apartheid. His current research focuses on screenwriting practices and the South African film industry. Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar are retired Professors, School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Their documentary films, which have been screened across the world, have won 33 national and international awards, including the Basil Wright Prize 2013 for So Heddan So Hoddan (Like Here Like There, 2011), at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, UK. Their publications include A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India, Sage, 2016, which has won a Special Mention for the best book on cinema in the Indian National Film Awards, 2016. A. Chukwudumebi Obute is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tübingen, and currently a visiting scholar to the University of Maryland. He completed his doctoral programme at the University of Tübingen in 2022, and his dissertation explored the nexus between the Niger and the Mississippi delta regions of Nigeria and America respectively from slavery to the environmental ruins of petrocapitalism. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen, and also worked as a visiting lecturer at the University of Rostock. His research interests include environmental humanities, African American literatures and cultures, postcolonialism, cultures of extractive capitalism, and the Global South. He is the co-editor of the volume Mediascapes of Ruined Geographies in the Global South (2023).

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) was founded in 2010 with funding from The Andrew W Mellon Foundation to engage with histories and knowledge from the Global South. Apart from funding master’s and PhD fellowships, CISA organized a number of workshop and conferences on questions such as thinking theory from Africa, capitalism, concepts from the Global South, the question of expulsions and xenophobia, and cinemas of the Global South. The conferences were conceptualized by postdoctoral fellows attached to the Centre because of generous funding from the University of Witwatersrand’s Research Office. This conference was conceptualized by Amir Taha and generously funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS), Johannesburg. Ntombifuthi Buthelezi, the Administrative Officer at CISA, handled the administration of the funding and organizing the logistics of the conference with aplomb. Jörn-Jan Leidecker, the bureau head of RLS, was enthusiastic about the project and very generous with his time for discussions, and in arranging for funding. Nyakunu Tafadzwa, the RLS, helped negotiate the funding bureaucracy with alacrity and charm. The Wits School of Arts was generous in providing us with the space for the conference and arranging for the technical requirements. Adele Prins and Givan Lotz designed the brilliant poster, as they have done for all our events and conferences. Adele is singular in her ability to create just the right image after hours of conversation about the ideas motivating a conference. We would like to thank The Bioscope (then at Maboneng and now located in Milpark) for allowing us use of their space for screenings of films.

1 CINEMAS OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH Towards a Southern Aesthetics Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

It appears to be a truism that different spaces have different visual aesthetics inflected by culture, history, and environment. At the same time, this appears to be too empirical an answer, given the artifice of cinema and its relation to an idea of reality. As Deleuze points out, the two times of history and cinema cannot be mapped one on to the other; at best, they occasionally intersect. This draws us into discussions of the immanence of form and formal construction of the visual image, taking us away from ways of thinking that make direct connections between cinema and the nation, or to particular historical conjuncture (post-Soviet cinema, post-revolution Iranian cinema, post-colonial cinema), and so on. The problem remains of how one is to relate aesthetics and historical or sociological location; to pay attention to form while at the same time not arguing for the absolute autonomy of the visual image. We are aware that images are never invented ex nihilo but exist within a history of global circulation of imaginings from art, cinema, religious iconography, literature, and metaphors of nature. This allows for the experience of resonance and of rhyming with multiple locations; Hollywood is at the same time strange as well as familiar to Asian and African audiences: the recognizable phenomenon of quotation, repetition, and plagiarism that are the features of popular cinema, whether Nigerian, Hindi or American. These features also help create a common global visual aesthetic that allows the distinction between genres – comedy, action, sci-fi – so central to popular cinema. These are some of the questions that inflect the discussion that follows on thinking about an aesthetics of cinema from the global south.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832-1

2  Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

Cinematic Aesthetics in General

What is cinema? This question is as old as cinema itself. The question “what is …?” is, too, as ancient as the history of thought. In the context of this volume, it seems that to avoid this question entirely might be a shortcoming. The urge to define cinema may lead to a similar kind of lacuna, as in the attempts of scholars of the last century, which has led for the most part to a process of stratification and of rigid categorization. Modernists such as Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot gave us their beloved hierarchal categorization of high culture, low culture, and popular culture. This was also applied to cinema. According to James Monaco, there exist three notions when we talk about cinema. First, film as the overall medium: cinematic films, television, amateur footage, news, ads, films, and the like. Second, movies: the commercial side of film such as Hollywood narrative cinema, blockbusters and the studio system. In other words, the term movies is linked to the American theatres: “we are going to the movies”. It is entertainment, popcorn and box office receipts. Third, cinema: the artistic dimension of film (Monaco 2011). Now, if we are to apply this division to the modernist idea: movies circulate in the realm of low and popular culture while cinema is high culture. Monaco adds that within film, a further division has been created: narrative commercial cinema and art-cinema (Monaco 2011). We are a group of scholars from the Global South, another manifestation of the earlier classification of the Third World; probably a fading “trend” in academia. How we understand the term Global South may vary, but one thing we do have in common: we “southerners” are scattered over the globe, and each in their milieu is embarking on a process of knowledge production within which an entangled movement is taking place. Most of us are trained in a Western/Eurocentric paradigm, some of us are filmmakers too; yet all of us are rooted in and bring in “southern” histories, subjective experiences, traditions, and perspectives. In other words, we form an assemblage within a larger assemblage: the Global South. In producing this volume, we attempt to present yet another assemblage which explores the notion of southern aesthetics. From a southern perspective, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, the militant intellectuals and filmmakers who wrote the groundbreaking text Towards Third Cinema (1970), call the narrative, commercial Hollywood model first cinema. They defined it as that in which “man is accepted only as a passive and consuming object; rather than having his ability to make history recognized, he is only permitted to read history, contemplate it, listen to it, undergo it.” It is a “spectacle aimed at a digesting object” (1970). The viewer is a consumer of ideology, not a creator of ideology. Art-cinema for Solanas and Getino is called second cinema. The second cinema often thematizes the situation of disaffected colonial subjects who can neither posit nor effect a social basis of transformation, caught up as they are in the ideology

Cinemas of the Global South  3

of bourgeois individualism. It thus remains closer to forms of existence but is not yet revolutionary (Solanas and Getino 1970). The two authors then coined the term Third Cinema, which sets out to fight “the system,” and sees itself as a weapon in a collective struggle against racist, capitalist domination. It is defined as a cinema of liberation. It understands the collective character not only of history making but of historically individuated subjects (Solanas and Getino 1970). They see Third Cinema as an act of inserting the work as an original fact in the process of liberation, placing it first at the service of life itself, ahead of art. They appeal for dissolving aesthetics in the life of society; quoting Frantz Fanon they say only in this way “can decolonisation become possible, and culture, cinema, and beauty – at least, what is of greatest importance to us – become our culture, our films, and our sense of beauty” (Solanas and Getino 1970). Building on the notion of Third Cinema, we would like to focus on the question of aesthetics. However, we remain skeptical about divisions; the northern division of commercial versus art-cinema, and the second division by Solanas and Getino of first, second, and third cinemas. We would rather elaborate a concept of southern aesthetics. This is not to be understood as rejecting what Solanas and Getino appealed for, basically a cinema of decolonialization. On the contrary. Our main concern is to depart from the question of what is cinema in favour of the question of what does cinema do: to move from ontology to praxis. Moreover, if we create a rigid division among cinemas, we will face, first, the problem of aesthetics as in saying: all chronological and causal narratives are necessarily commercial, hierarchical, and even colonial. Second, such a division is in itself hierarchical: first, second and Third Cinemas. However, we do understand that at the historic moment (the 1960s) at which Solanas and Getino wrote their texts, such a notion was necessary and valid. Let us not forget that the very term, the Global South, was developed from the term Third World after all. Our argument is that the medium of film is heterogeneous. In most commercial and spectacular films, we can also see the so-called art-cinema aesthetics. Taking Spielberg’s films as an example, he utilizes the technique of one-take/long-take in all of his films, the very same technique used by Italian neo-realism, which is considered as art-cinema. The shot-reverse-shot technique created and employed by Hollywood can be seen in many art-films. Even a straightforward chronological narrative may be used in so-called art-films; take Bela Tar’s The Turin Horse (2011) as an example. In this sense, what is crucial here is what does aesthetics do and how. When Solanas and Getino say that by dissolving aesthetics in the life of society, decolonialization becomes possible, allowing us to talk of “our culture, our films, and our sense of beauty” (1970), we do agree, but we would also add that the question of aesthetics is neither an abstract nor a borrowed element. Aesthetics are created, discovered, rediscovered, mutated, circulate, and are sometimes bent. The notion of revolutionary cinema seen by the

4  Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

authors as a process of decolonialization must be examined in the light of the twenty-first century in which the concept of revolution itself needs to be re-examined and redefined. Thus, in discussing a concept of southern aesthetics, we argue that we can build upon the spirit of Solanas and Getino’s idea of resistance and decolonialization, but we should also add the following notions: virtuality, creativity, entanglement, and affect. All these notions, we argue, are intertwined with one another. In other words, we shall go north again, and pick a concept: bend it, mutate it, and re-assign it – the concept of assemblage coined by Deleuze and Guattari (2005) and further developed by Manuel De Landa (2006). We argue that Southern aesthetics is one creative assemblage within a larger assemblage called the Global South. In Cinema 2 (1985), Deleuze argued that “the linkage between film and the viewer’s thoughts is the shockwave or the nervous vibration which means we can no longer say ‘I see, I hear,’ but I FEEL’” (1986). The image is the pre-thought, or rather the unthought. The Deleuzian understanding of cinema is very useful because it includes the notion of affect as the main force of cinema. Also, it deals with the viewer and his relationship to the image as organic and non-separable. The notion of the image as pre-thought is itself an element of resistance; so is the concept of affect which the image creates. For the largest part, up until this very moment, academia has dealt with cinema in terms of thoughts. Still for many scholars, subjective experience is a dead end which one cannot examine objectively. We believe that we, as academics of the south, can deal with cinema not only as professional readers/viewers, but also as audience. Nonprofessional viewers enjoy cinema; so do we. There can be no shame in enjoying Marvel films, despite Scorsese’s opinion that they are not cinema. In Egypt, one used to like Hindi films with a duration of four hours not because a shot or frame revealed the imaginarium of an Indian identity. Rather, one felt something and both laughed at as well as was thrilled by Amitabh Bachchan’s ability to destroy a whole crowd of villains. One had fun with it. So, southern aesthetics are in both modes: production and perception. It constitutes a resistance against the hierarchy of tastes, appropriation of genre, and arguably, even against the modernist notion of art. Various definitions of the term Global South have been offered: is the word “south” to be written with a lower case or upper case ‘s’? The geographical or the conceptual? One of the answers to this question is found in Vijay Prashad’s The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2014). He argues that the Global South’s objective in the twenty-first century is the dismantling of the neoliberal project. Moreover, Prashad engages in a historiographical process through which he tells the story of the effects of neoliberalism from a southern perspective. He offers another narrative of the rise and dominance of neoliberalism whose starting point was the 1970s’ “enforced” debt crisis (2014). Here, Prashad’s historiography is a clear

Cinemas of the Global South  5

example of a narrative with southern characteristics: to move from ontology to praxis by engaging in an act of history-writing. Telling the tale from a southern perspective is not just an alternative history to the North-centric narrative of neoliberalism. It is also not just an act of resistance to a history written now by a northern critical eye, as in David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2007). Rather, the southern act of writing history, whether concerning neoliberalism or in general, is concerned with creating new types of realities both actual and virtual. Menon (2018) has argued that the idea of the Global South is an invitation to imagine the world afresh. In many ways, the twentieth century was, to borrow Lauren Berlant’s plangent phrase, one of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) when something one desires is actually an obstacle to one’s flourishing. The nation-state, imagined in opposition to colonial power and projecting the future citizen against the subject, was visualized as an emancipatory program. Instead it incarcerated, marginalized, and dispossessed its constituents at the same time. He suggests that we think about the Global South as an ongoing project, a conceptual and experiential category that is not a mere geographical agglomeration, that is, Asia+Africa+Latin America+Caribbean: a reframing of the decolonized world. It insists on a recognition of ongoing relations of coloniality (to echo Mignolo 2011), whether they be political, economic, or epistemological. Following from this, we need to address the aesthetic production from these spaces, and not have the persistent return, or staying with a theoretical framing from within a Euro-American episteme of the last three centuries (Menon 2018). Against this backdrop, we understand the Global South as follows, as an assemblage of deterritorialization and decolonialization. In actuality, it is an assemblage of virtuality, creativity, and affect. An assemblage is horizontal and non-hierarchical. It consists of lines entangled in one another which are in a constant process of forming and re-forming and escaping the state’s task of capture, control, and re-appropriation. The Global South is an assemblage of virtuality. The virtual is the horizon of potentiality, “of not yet, but potentially actualized actuality” (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 99). The Global South is also a virtuality of affect. Affect, according to Brian Massumi (2015) is “a process of affecting and being affected which is to be open to the world, to be active in it and be patient for its return activity. This openness is also taken as primary. It is the cutting edge of change. It is through it that thingsin-the-making cut their transformational teeth” (ix). The artistic sensibility of the Global South exists within the larger southern assemblage. Thus, southern aesthetics are defined by A process of decolonization and deterritorialization 1 2 Resistance 3 Affect

6  Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

To talk about southern aesthetics, we cannot avoid the historical context of cinema, for the history of cinema itself is concurrent with the history of southern cinema. Let us discuss the three aspects of southern aesthetics with the example of Egyptian cinema. Cinema arrived in Africa, Asia, and South America as soon as it was born. For example, the Lumiere Brothers screened their work in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1896. The same year also witnessed the screening of Lumiere’s work in India and South Africa. One year later, Brazil screened the first film as well, and in 1898, the country produced its first film. In Nigeria, a few years later, in 1903, the first screening of a film took place (Shafik 2003). In other words, cinema in the geographical south is as old as cinema itself, meaning both modes of production and of perception. Soon enough these countries started to produce their own films. Here, we have the first aspect of the assemblage: a process of decolonialization and deterritorialization. Thinking Visual Aesthetics from Egypt

In the case of Egypt, starting from 1896, and up until 1924, film production was rich and vivid; the production companies were all Western until the year 1924. However, the two pioneers of Egyptian cinema, Mohammed Karim and Mohammed Bayoumi, both worked intensively in this era. The former was the first Egyptian both to appear in and direct films; the latter shot, directed, and produced up to eleven films. Bayoumi founded the first Egyptian production company in 1924 – Amon Films. Karim went to Berlin to study cinema and worked as an assistant to director Fritz Lang. When he came back to Egypt, he launched his cinema career together with Bayoumi, and both worked with various nationalities: Italian, French, German, Greek, Armenian, Lebanese, and Syrian. Here we see that a process of decolonialization had been already in the making. These two pioneers invaded the world of cinema in Egypt, which was dominated by the French, the Italians, and the Germans. Soon enough they started to make their own films and created a space for Egyptians to enter this world. This leads to the second aspect of southern aesthetics: resistance. Cinema in Egypt turned rapidly into an artistic assemblage of resistance in the sense that Egyptian filmmakers started to gradually break the European monopoly of cinema production both financially and artistically. It is also important to put this era into its historical context, for the British occupation of Egypt started in the year 1882. The year 1919 witnessed a revolution against the British and their puppet ruler, King Fouad. This resulted in the nominal recognition of Egypt as an independent state by the British in 1922; however, they remained as a de facto power on Egyptian soil. In 1923 the Egyptians drafted their first constitution, which made Egypt a parliamentary democracy. From 1923 up until 1952, the sociopolitical arena in Egypt was a battleground among the nationalist political parties on the one hand and the

Cinemas of the Global South  7

British and the royal court on the other. Cinema along with other arts, such as music, literature, and fine arts, was a part of this struggle with the focus on the complete independence of Egypt from the British and at times from the Monarchy. No wonder that the first Egyptian cinema production company was established by Mohammed Bayoumi in 1924 and launched its production by filming the return from exile of Saad Zaghloul – the Egyptian national leader who initiated the 1919 revolution and who was exiled by the British to Malta. Bayoumi produced a series of films during that time, one of them being Brasoum Is Looking for a Job (1924), which is the first feature silent short produced in the whole of Africa; a social comedy of two unemployed Egyptians fighting hunger and trying to find work. This film is the first wholly Egyptian production, written, shot, and edited by Bayoumi. This thirteen-minute film is entirely shot on location in real streets and alleys. Now, we have the third aspect: creativity. In 1927, the first Egyptian fulllength silent film, Leyla, directed by Widad Orfi, was produced by the newly establish Misr Studio, followed in 1932 by the first Egyptian talkie, Awlad Al Zawat (High Class Society) directed by the Egyptian cinematic pioneer Mohamed Karim. The establishment of Misr Studio in 1935 as an Egyptian holding company was political in nature. It was established by Talat Harb, an Egyptian economist visionary who participated in the revolution of 1919. By 1935, Misr Studio was the foremost and the largest production company in Egypt, Africa, the Arab world, and the entire Middle East. Harb sought to create an Egyptian national cinema. The most important production of Misr Studio was Kamal Selim’s Al Azima: The Will in 1939, characterized by George Sodoul, the French film historian, as one of the most important films in cinema history. Sodoul argues that The Will predated Italian neorealism, and he even drew a comparison between Selim’s film and De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief. Being a long feature film, it was the first Egyptian film to go out of the studios, and to deviate from the mainstream genres at the time: love stories, musicals, and upperclass settings. It portrays the life of the Egyptian working class and their struggle against the class of the Pashas. Like Bayoumi’s Barsoum Looking for a Job, Selim tells his story in the Egyptian alleys: in real life locations with many nonprofessional actors as extras. For the first time, an Egyptian talkie presented a portrait of realist subject matter, setting, and form. Al Azima’s importance also lies in its resistance and subversion on both levels: content and form. The subject matter deals with a young, educated man from the working class struggling against classism, bourgeois corruption, and the tyranny of capital to lead a dignified life. In terms of form, as mentioned before, the film creates a form of Egyptian realism through which it uses the alley as a space that is representative of Egyptian life, and it employs a cinematic language of realist imagery, such as the use of long takes, stable camera movement, and deep focus.

8  Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

Western scholars of cinema cite a number of films predating Italian neorealism as having been great influences on this movement. David Bordwell (1988) argues that the great Japanese filmmaker Ozu Yasujiro’s An Inn in Tokyo (1935) was one of these films. Ozu is the only non-Western filmmaker who is cited as influencing Italian neorealism by almost every Western scholar. Here, we would add Kamal Selim along with Brazil’s Humberto Mauro’s Argila (1940), India’s Shantaram (Duniya Na Mane 1937) and Mexico’s Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Muriel (Redes 1936) along with Ozu to the list of non-European filmmakers whose realist films predated Italian neorealism both aesthetically and in terms of content. The examples we mentioned show that these cinemas were able to form their own visions and their own languages in a process of deterritorialization and decolonialization. The creative process that filmmakers such as Kamal Selim, Mauro, and Shantaram had been engaged in sought to mutate and transform the cinematic knowledge they gained from the colonizers into new languages and techniques. The content of Selim’s films is by no means separated from their creative form and style; for example, a wide shot of the alley showing the small details in deep focus, the slow panning and tilting camera movements introducing the characters in their environment, and the composition of the frames to create a visual meaning. Kamal Selim’s Al Azima established a cinematic motif which runs through Egyptian realist cinema: the alley. The alley is also Nagib Mahfouz’s main literary cosmos in his middle phase (the Cairo trilogy Ben El Qasreen, Qasr Al Shawq, and Al Sukkariyya; and the novels Midaaq Alley and The Sons of Our Alley). The alley in Al Azima, and afterwards in Egyptian cinema, specifically the works of Salah Abu Seif (the forerunner of second-generation realist cinema) became an Egyptian subgenre within the realist genre. The alley as a spatial unit; an intensive space in which various characters live and interact with one another represents in many realist films the Egyptian society and sometimes even Egypt as such. Moreover, the notion of resistance is evident when we examine Selim’s, Mauro’s, and Shantaram’s films: first, the social dimension of the story and second, the creation of a new genre, which runs counter to the then existing popular genres. While the dominant genres at the time whether in India, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt were musicals, comedies, and romance, these filmmakers wanted to access and present the social realities of their societies. In doing so, this aesthetic was to reach a wider audience in these countries who made cinema into a popular art, a cultural practice, and even a tool of communal life by building provisional cinemas and touring talkies. Now it is worth asking about affect, which is the third aspect of Southern aesthetics. Let us be viewers for a moment and visualize the Egyptian audience watching Al Azima in 1939. Let us imagine how these images affected them, what they felt, specifically the working-class audience, known as the TERZO.1 Let us

Cinemas of the Global South  9

go a step further and ask about non-Egyptian audiences, not the colonizers, but our audiences: in India, in Mexico, in Brazil, in Nigeria at the time. What about a viewing of this film in 2019 with all the filmic memory that we have? When thinking about these questions, keywords like amusement, fascination, fun, empathy, compassion, history, historiography, knowledge, relating come to mind. We could add more, but above all, affect. An Indian Aesthetics of Cinema?

To move to another space, we would like to think with some formulations about the possibility of a distinct Indian aesthetics whether in art or commercial cinema, keeping with the themes of deterritorialization, resistance, and creativity. That said, one could equally argue that all art-cinema is alike, while commercial cinema is different, each in its own way. The director as auteur creates a visually literate space that makes evident both the continuity with global cinema as well as the break, through elaborating an individual aesthetics. For instance, the Indian new wave director Kumar Shahani, who understudied Robert Bresson, manifested many of the formal elements of a Bressonian aesthetics while making very “Indian” films in terms of plot and content, whether Maya Darpan (1972) or Char Adhyaya (1997). The question whether Indian art-cinema managed to generate a distinct Indian aesthetic is a complicated one. That they portrayed an Indian reality goes without saying whether we are talking about Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, or Ritwik Ghatak. However, the more difficult question to answer is whether there was there a visual aesthetic that drew upon Indian theories of viewing, audience, or staging? In the case of Yasujiro Ozu, David Bordwell, among others, has argued for a very Japanese aesthetics of setting and staging a shot (Bordwell, 1988). There has been little work done on Indian art-cinema for us to draw any firm conclusions, but two elements that have received attention in popular cinema have been the idea of darshan and that of melodrama. Ashish Rajadhyaksha has argued that the viewing of the cinema star as hero/heroine possessed of powers of affect bears a strong relation to the way in which Indian devotees perceive their gods, which resonated with anthropological works on the place of viewing in Hinduism (Eck, 1981). To have a darshan or affective viewing of God, and being viewed in turn, in the temple is comparable to the experience of seeing stars on the screen in a darkened theatre (Rajadhyaksha, 1987). S.V. Srinivas has extended this idea to explore the phenomenon of fan clubs in southern India, in which young men create nodes suffused with affect, devotion, and respect around popular film stars in Tamil and Kannada film (Srinivas, 2009, 2013). Ravi Vasudevan has characterized the world of Hindi cinema as characterized by the melodramatic imagination with an excess of sentimentality and tropes of heroic abnegation (Vasudevan,

10  Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

2010). Though Hindi cinema of a particular era did resonate with the Douglas Sirk melodramas of Hollywood, the range of plots and characters and the resistance to consistency of register – films are comedies, tragedies, and satires rolled into one – make it difficult to characterize Hindi cinema by the classic rules of genre. Just as Srinivas has argued for a politics of devotion that hinges on an aesthetic of excess – the hero as divine – Ashis Nandy has argued that there is an affective synergy between artifact and audience. Hindi films in his opinion reflect the slum’s eye view of the world, drawing on the hopes, dreams, and illusions of those marginalized in society (Nandy, 1998). This was particularly true when he wrote in the 1990s, when the superstar Amitabh Bachhan was at the apogee of his career playing the angry, idealistic subaltern. Economic liberalization, the expansion of the economy, and the phenomenon of the wealthy non-resident Indian was to change the tenor of Hindi films. What is significant in all of these formulations is the search for something distinctive about Hindi cinema in terms of its making and viewership. It could be argued that Ravi Vasudevan is closest to the mark when he argues for the presence of melodrama as a trope which could partially explain the popularity of Hindi cinema across Asia, Africa, and at one time, the Soviet Union. The presentation of values of sacrifice, heroism, family honour, and so on had a broad appeal to both those who sought tradition, as well as those who espoused traditional values. However, the question remains: given the circulation of an international aesthetic, how distinctly “southern” was the cinematic aesthetic of Indian cinema. While there were directors and films that engaged with themes of middle-class life (albeit through the tropes of love and family), this parallel cinema remained largely within the paradigm of Hindi cinema. There were tighter and less improbable plots, more down to earth dialogues, music and lyrics of greater literary quality, but these were aimed at the same audience who were looking for something different. Whether the films of Basu Chatterjee and Basu Bhattacharya (done outside of the big studio framework) or southern films remade for a Hindi speaking audience by Dasari Narayana Rao or B Nagi Reddi (from the studios of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu), they were reluctant to break the mould. It was in the 1970s that the National Film Development Corporation began funding avant-garde and offbeat films in Hindi as much as regional languages. Gita Kapur has remarked on the irony of a state sponsored avant-garde in her contention of a compromised modernity in India (Kapur, 2000). These films, of which Shyam Benegal became the exemplar, dealt with the question of India’s unattained modernity and its social problems ranging from feudalism in the villages to questions of caste and gender. There was very little formal innovation, and it could be argued that the deep commitment to social change in itself was the hallmark of the new aesthetic (Prasad, 2001).

Cinemas of the Global South  11

The Apu Trilogy of Satyajit Ray between 1955 and 1959 marked a departure in terms of style and substance. Influenced as he was by European cinema, and his early association with Jean Renoir, he made a departure in his time by taking Bengali film out of the studio as well as working with unknown actors whom he then framed within his distinctive vision. Over time he brought in stalwarts of the Bengali film industry, but it was difficult to imagine Ray’s actors outside of his refined aesthetic. Ray as an auteur was all pervasive – screenwriter, music director, and cinematographer – with every scene carefully hand drawn before it was picturized (Robinson, 2022; Ray, 2016). The gritty rural realism of the Apu trilogy was matched by his later evocations of the claustrophobia and anxieties of middle-class life in films like Pratidwandi (1970), Jana Aranya (1971), and Seemabaddha (1976). There was a distinctive look and feel to the deceptive simplicity of his narration. It was an aesthetic governed by space – interiors suffused by conventionality; by affect – emotions held in check and revealed by gesture and inflection; and by music – composed by Ray in a remarkable hybrid of Indian classical, folk, and European tones. It was also the apotheosis of the new Indian middle classes, caught between the values of the gentry and the new modern. Bengali cinema found a voice in Ray and his brilliant contemporary Ritwik Ghatak – who distilled the experience of the Partition of Bengal and made loss the affect that governed his aesthetic – and subsequently a galaxy of filmmakers from Mrinal Sen to Buddhadeb Dasgupta. A distinctly cosmopolitan aesthetic emerged, characterized by a rootedness in Bengali culture and an easy familiarity with world cinema and its idioms. The French New Wave and its experiments with the artifice of cinema found an echo. In southern India, the works of the maverick directors John Abraham (his classic film on a donkey in a brahmin village riffing on Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthasar) and G. Aravindan (cartoonist and government employee) expressed an aesthetic uncompromising in its commitment to visuality and the sonicscape of the film. They drew upon untrained actors in order to move away from notions of glamour and beauty that characterized popular cinema at the time. Aravindan in particular subordinated the pace of his films to the temporality of south Indian classical music and his films as well as the early films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan have a reverie-like quality. Time in these films was dilatory and personal, and viewers were required to subordinate their preconceptions about the pace of cinema when they entered the hall. Arguably, there was a distinct politics of time being articulated here, of a rural stuckedness, as it were, at one level and the transcendental interiority of classical music at another. However, we have little writing on the aesthetics of Indian art-cinema to go on and these are but initial thoughts. In these diverse instances, there was an attempt to delineate a particular aesthetics that was both visual and temporal. In Gopalakrishnan and Aravindan, the emphasis on the ordinariness, even anonymity of the

12  Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

protagonists, was a break from the cult of personality in popular cinema. In terms of narration, they abandoned linearity for immersion; one moved through time rather than images or plot. Characters were subordinated to the dilatory temporality of the visual; the protagonist on the landscape was no more important than the features of the landscape or the occasional movements of the clouds or wind. It was not about timelessness but timefulness; one lived in time; waiting and expectation were part of the business of living. The use of music exalted this viscous sense of time. In classical Indian music, the musician determines the temporality of the rendition of a raag or song, and the expertise and skill lie in the multitude of variations on a theme. This sense of repetition with variation could be said to encapsulate the experience of being in the rural and semi-urban spaces of India before liberalization collapsed distinctions and accelerated movement. This was a distinct aesthetics of a moment: of the emergence of an idea of modern India. While Ray and Benegal were concerned with a depiction of spaces, social history, and characters, the southern directors sculpted with time. The last two decades have seen an increasing engagement with a diversity of themes moving away from the classic divide between rural and urban and summoning up the anomie of the small town. The small towns have become the way stations on the road to the modern, and what Ashvin Devasundaram has called the “indies” or independent filmmakers have drawn upon the violence, frustration, and enterprise of these spaces (Devasundaram, 2016). This new gritty aesthetic represented by filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Bharadwaj draws upon the idea of singular and distinctive characters in a variety of landscapes in northern India. In addition, the films play with a soundtrack that draws upon both folk as well as globally inflected rhythms. The exemplar of this was in the music by Amit Trivedi in Dev D (2009) a riff on a film classic, which drew its sounds from house, rap, wedding bands, and folk songs. There is a deliberate engagement here with the idea of a new aesthetic of a hybrid modern which marks a break from the invented urban village of popular Hindi cinema. Both in terms of theme as well as music and characters, the indies try to create a different and new visuality of an emergent Global South. This is important as the sense of global connectedness is at the same time mediated through characters who are aware that while globality is the aspiration, their lives remain accented by the local. The emergence of an aesthetics that rhymes with the larger spaces of the imagined Global South under the sign of a globality in which all do not participate equally has been one of the major departures in popular cinema. With the demise of the great auteurs, a new generation of directors committed to arthouse is yet to emerge. The spread of over-the-top media services (OTT) and internet services has also meant, paradoxically, the need for a distinctive Indian cinema that performs globality in terms of production values, realist acting, and an accelerated temporality that engages audience

Cinemas of the Global South  13

affect. There have been two routes of engagement. The first, has been literally over-the-top productions like Bahubali I and II (2015, 2017) and more recently RRR (2022), that are technologically driven and strive at a Hollywood fantasy aesthetic. The second, following on from Aravindan and Adoor, has made Malayalam cinema one of the most aesthetically innovative film industries. There is an urgent engagement with the present – of life mediated by cell phones and internet; the dangers of viral epidemics; and the continuing imbalance of gender roles. There is an exigent commitment to the local; a surprise hit like The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) reprises Henrik Ibsen’s Nora through the story of a woman subordinated to her role as wife labouring in the household, who finally ups and leaves the patriarchal jail of her home. The Malayalam film draws upon dialect, small lives, and the swirling issues of the present to forge a new aesthetic that redefines the space of popular cinema. An Aesthetics from the Global South?

Thinking an aesthetics from the Global South necessarily engages with the questions of location and provenance, but also issues of circulation, referentiality, and ironic quotation. The question of resistance manifests itself in the search for authenticity – of plot, character, and location – as much as style – vernacular and rooted styles of dialogue and music that depart from a national aesthetic to engage with rhythms and sounds from the Global South. Affect is central in the relation to particular histories, where emotion is politicised as a marker of history, as evidenced in the essays in the volume on Colombia (Amaya), Palestine (Amaral), or India (Jayasankar-Monteiro). There is no univocal adherence to an idea of the Global South here; each essay articulates a particular landscape of provisional engagement. There is a productive tension between the idea of the global that is implicated in continuing relations of imperial power and global capitalism (Obute) and local forms of aesthetic production that engage with ideas of translation and transcreation that are resistant (Heatlie and Hariharan). Central to the works discussed here is the subjective artifice, conceit, or aspiration of articulating a cinematic vision from a space (Taha, Devasundaram). As Taha points out, seeing cinema as an assemblage of production, distribution, viewership as much as directorial vision, plot, dialogue, and aurality allows us to think a particular aesthetics within a larger landscape of imbrications of objective circumstances of global capital and politics, as much as subjective perceptions of self and aspiration. One of the key founding moments for Taha’s elaboration of a film aesthetics from Egypt is the breaking away of Egyptian filmmakers from the monopoly of European cinema production and the setting up of their own studios and film production companies. This act of decolonization and resistance speaks to

14  Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

a third element in his argument of the generation of a distinct affect governed by location and engagement with local history. The essay focuses on Shady Abdelsalam’s The Day of Counting the Years (1969), a film from the age of a mature Egyptian cinema which creates a distinct Egyptian visual aesthetic, from the use of dress and costume to the use of hieroglyphics as well as the use of high Arabic in keeping with the recollection of a history past. In particular, the deliberate focus on the eyes of the protagonist, Wanis, as he surveys monuments recalls the symbology of the eye in Egyptian mythology related to health, protection, and restoration. The film is set in the early twentieth century context of the trade in pharaonic monuments and the pillaging of artefacts. A global imperial discourse locates the Egyptian past as a scarce resource subject to plunder by avaricious locals; the film itself is a counter to the actual history, a recuperation of a utopian possible moment of Egyptian agency as heroic. Central to the film is the effort of an Egyptian archaeologist (as opposed to a European one in “real history”), and a heroic young Egyptian who goes against his family and tribe in order to enact the preservation and iconization of the pyramids and the history of ancient Egypt in the present. The film raises the resonant question of what the work of memory after colonialism is, to be haunted both by the idea of resurrection as well as bad faith. On another register, Abdelsalam, having worked with European directors like Joseph Mankiewicz and Roberto Rossellini, creates his own vision inflected by the circulation of the forms of a global cinema. His insistence on Egyptian finances for Egyptian cinema, which delays the making of the film, and curtails the production of another on account of his death, is reflective of a politics of resistance that runs like a vein through the idea of a cinema from the Global South. As Taha puts it, there is a poignant search for a “mode of historiography which is not concerned with the hegemonic”; a lack of concern that does not ignore but sets aside and thinks beyond. Central to the essay is the plangent question of a re-creation of a past, an artifice that believes that the past just as the future can be remade from the present: what does the engagement with Pharaonic Egypt mean for a modern decolonized sensibility? Two essays take up the documentary form in which the engagement with history and the present is more immediate and purposive, as is the idea of restoration, in both the senses of preservation as well as justice. Diego Amaral’s essay works its way through the documentary Looted and Hidden (2017) and the stories told by its four protagonists. The film works with the after histories of the Israeli Defence Force’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the raiding and almost destruction of the archives Cultural Arts Section of the Palestinians in exile. This is a particular story of the Global South in which “imperial durabilities” (Stoler 2016) persist and colonialism is an ongoing story and “speaking from the south” is an attempt to rethink a history of the present through fragments and debris to write about a stateless people in an era of nation-states. Photographs and images become a

Cinemas of the Global South  15

necessary “supplement” and witness to a history of the destruction of forms of archives as well as lives. What Amaral calls poetically the curatorship of the “fugacious image” generates a constellation of perceptions in which the spectator has to constitute the film through the assemblage in the film. There is no pure authorship here; the director, the camera, the spectator reconstitute a partial and ever vanishing set of images and memories. But there is also a utopian play on time, a turning back to a past which is the cinematic present, when there was the co-presence of Israel and Palestine; though a time still marked by demolition, rubble, and debris. Amidst this very dispersed story of exile, trauma, and resistance there is also the appeal to the Third Cinema of the 1970s. The political struggle informed by a southern aesthetics remembers and connects with the liberation movements of Cuba, Algeria, and their contribution to Palestinian cinema; creating what Amaral calls a “decolonial aesthetics.” If the narrative of the film is premised not on fullness but a fragmentary archive, an effect enhanced through the contrasting, yet complementary, narrations of the four interviewees, there is an understanding that this is the nature of life in a majority of the Global South. Amaral summons up Benjamin’s idea of looking at the stars and the reading of disparate, non contiguous entities which are nevertheless held together at the moment of viewing – the zeitmoment. History is left “up in the air” but not in an irresolute manner; it is up in the air that history becomes visible for a recuperation through a conscious act of viewing and restoration. The politics of an otherwise with regard to the ineluctability of power and its effects marks this essay as much as Taha’s earlier one, speaking to what could be seen as the image of hopeful monsters: those that have the potential to establish a new evolutionary lineage. An aesthetic of hope, of the future, of earlier imaginings of futures, as much as the presence of futures past inform the aesthetic of this film and articulate a particular position from the Global South: a visual holding together of past, present, and future in the moment. As Kundera famously observed, history is about the struggle between remembering and forgetting, given arbitrary states and regimes of censorship. The control of meaning is also about generating a structured forgetting of histories of resistance. This has become an exigent issue in contemporary India with the rise of Hindu majoritarianism and a politics of authoritarian governance. In many senses, the latter feature has become a feature not only of politics in the Global South – India, Brazil, China – but also in countries in Eastern Europe – Hungary, Poland. Given the draconian restrictions on free speech and artistic production in India, Anjali Monteiro, and K.P. Jayasankar argue pace Brecht that there will always be singing, particularly in dark times. The idea of resistance to global empire goes alongside opposition to postcolonial governments invested in the idea of the sovereignty of the nation-state, as against the people. Of course, as the authors argue, there is no singular aesthetic of the Global South, but there is a perception of a

16  Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

common condition that generates conversations and the circulation of forms of imagining. The essay discusses two documentary films separated in time by a few decades but engaging with the same phenomenon – the vitiation of the public sphere in India by a politics of division and hatred. A detailed engagement with a branch of the Hindu rightwing organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, involves letting the members tell their stories as they go about the daily rituals of affirmation and indoctrination. The director does not intervene, nor does he censor; counter to the practices of the state, he allows the protagonists their say. It is this clear portrayal of a sensibility of animosity that disguises the art of filmmaking: an aesthetics of judicious selection that presents itself as the ‘real’. The lack of censorship draws attention to the censorship that surrounds the citizen in everyday life, particularly those who are of a dissenting temperament. The second documentary picks up the threads of a quotidian politics not through an institution or party but through an engagement with conversations around a tea stall; that resonant marker of the public sphere in India. It weaves in demotic language peppered with the scatological and engages with the insurgent subaltern engagement with an emergent public sphere marked by the intimacies of the face-to-face alongside the face-to-screen. The deliberate construction of the regimes of post-truth is mediated through everyday conversation, social media, and the intimate violence of relations governed by friction as much as sociability. The visual and sonic aesthetic of the films discussed here points to a distinct phenomenon of the Global South, the construction of a contingent sociability through words that connect bodies, in violence, argument, and amiable insult. The essay records the emergence of a particular ethic of visuality: of singing/seeing/hearing in dark times that is marked by the dissent of observation and the observation of dissent. It looks at the demotic working out of politics in the everyday and visualises it as a distinct aesthetic of the Global South where both democracy and dissent are works in progress. Ashvin Devasundaram engages with the reigning paradigm of a specifically Indian visual aesthetic that is conflated with “Bollywood” which then becomes the national cinema form. “Bollywood” (more accurately Hindi cinema, if we are not to succumb to Hollywood as the paradigm of popular cinema) is one of the many film industries in India and occupies both an antagonistic as much as symbiotic relation with films in regional languages ranging from Telugu and Tamil to Marathi and Malayalam. Each of these cinemas has a distinct visual and sociological aesthetic, inflected by regional uniqueness as much as borrowings and citations of global cinema as well as films in Hindi. Devasundaram also points to the transcultural flows of the present – Netflix and other platforms – that move us away from a search for indigenous theories and ways of viewing; a particular affect rooted in an “Indian” sensibility as it were. He looks at the working-out of the indie aesthetic – the visual register of independent films – that works out an

Cinemas of the Global South  17

“antithetical” imagination that runs counter to the hegemony of Hindi popular cinema as much as an emergent political paradigm that purveys Hindu majoritarianism in the public sphere. As with the previous essay, there is a conscious working out of a counter-politics but this time in the realm of popular feature films. The indies present a “plural, pragmatic and alternative paradigm” of subaltern protagonists and their precarious lives, projecting a “local realism”. Alongside the national history of the emergence of parallel cinema, the indies also share in the assumptions and visuality of Third Cinema – the interweaving of the local and the global that makes up the distinct aesthetics of the Global South. There is a telling of “Indian” life here but ranging from the home to the world, from the kitchen to stories of individual and territorial insurgencies. A comprehensive landscape is delineated in which patriarchy, for example is eviscerated – through satirical representations of the violence of bourgeois domesticity; a questioning of heterosexual norms that undergird Hindu nationalism; and looking at life in spaces that resist the territorial violence of the Indian state in spaces such as Kashmir. In the current atmosphere of febrile religious nationalism, the films discussed in this essay take up religion as patriarchal ideology, but also explore the management of religion in everyday life as an alternative imagination of self and community. This is parallel cinema, both in its invocation of earlier cinematic histories, but also in constituting a parallel imagination that invokes the aporias of a postcolonial (and not yet) landscape. The question of resistance runs like a vein through the essays, as exemplary of the politics of the Global South, where an equitable and democratic politics is always a work in progress. As Damon Heatlie points out in his essay on the 1940s Hollywood gangster films and the everyday life of the South African Indian under apartheid, reflecting on a southern aesthetic may take the form of invoking “guerrilla practice” or a delineation of “local granularity”. Heatlie steps out of the screen and studies the construction of a local sartorial aesthetic among South African Indians modeled on the style of American gangsters in the Hollywood imagination. While the films themselves were morality tales – crime does not pay – for a population subject to racial hierarchization, gangster style embodied an antiestablishment aesthetics of being that allowed for a visual performance of insubordination. It is this suppleness of adaptation by the not-so-passive consumers of cinema that points to both imagination and movement as features of a southern sensibility, in Heatlie’s words. When we consider the aesthetics of the cinema of the Global South, Heatlie reminds us that we need to look at the effects of cinema, the question that we raise in the Introduction of what does cinema do? With well-cut suits, combination shoes, and brilliantined hair, South African Indians in the 1940s and 1950s performed an “aesthetics of unruliness”, of a disobedience that appropriated Hollywood into a very local history. Heatlie points to the fascinating fact of how the vicinity of cinema halls in Durban

18  Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

themselves became the sites of violence and the locales of gang war; it was almost as if life imitated art with a vengeance. The language of gangster Hollywood came to be appropriated by local Indian gang members giving them an argot of virility and detachment as also of drama to speak about their exploits in contravention of apartheid law: scofflaws against white law. The landscape of viewing included Hollywood as well as the melodramatic ethically infused films coming in from India; Afro-Asian affinities played a role too in the making of disobedient selves. An ethics of community and obligation was knit into the gangster performative creating a distinct South African Indian viewing mode that moved from screen to bodies. Heatlie raises the important question of not only production but of the reasons and manner of consumption of cinematic effect in enacting resistance. Moreover, he looks at viewing in a global scape, where both Hollywood and Hindi cinema work on the imagination to generate unintended effects and strange hybrids of performance among viewers. Veena Hariharan in her study of a Malayalam film stays within the realm of popular cinema while looking at an antithetical imagination that Devasundaram would contend is the feature of the indies. In a film that eerily presages the COVID-19 pandemic, Virus (2019), looks at the origin and spread of the Nipah virus in the state of Kerala through the interwoven stories of migrants, nurses, and doctors as also the concatenation of humans and animals that generated new viruses and the dangerous porosity of bodies to illness. The visuality of the film is inflected by global cinema, but in its central ethic, the plot of the film is governed by the ethical behaviour of doctors and the unremitting responsibility of government towards those under its protection – a utopian vision of pastoral care that is distinctly of the Global South in its provenance. Virus draws upon the visual scape of the Mexican director Inarritu’s Babel, which brought to Hollywood the dispersed narratives, microstories, windowing, and dynamic camera that sought to capture the fragmentation of life in the Global South. It also works with the global yet locally inflected worlds of social media and the cyber public and the ever present threats of hacker praxis. Given that China and India lead in the use of social media, the film works with the co-presence, mediation, and intersection of multiple media giving a sense of the pace and disjunctured nature of identity and lives in the Global South. Hariharan frontally engages with the questions of borrowing, adaptation, quotation, and plagiarism which characterize the circulation and dispersion of cinema in the world. While Virus draws upon Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion (2011), which worked with the spread of a deadly virus from China to the rest of the world, as Hariharan points out, it is the dissimilarities that are remarkable for engaging with a distinctly Global South point of view. Virus moves away from the racialized geography of the American film as also the moral indictment of the main protagonists, whose sexual peccadilloes are in part responsible for the rapidity of the transmission. It instead draws upon the idea of a fragile dependence

Cinemas of the Global South  19

of humans and animals, and the normalcy of unthinking behaviour, a belief in human actions that have unintended consequences. There is a greater compassion towards humans caught up in something that they do not comprehend, as also a sensitive portrayal of those handling crises that are new and unexpected leading to tragedies beyond anyone’s control. Here again, we return to both the questions of resistance as much as affect; we are asked as viewers to identify with those who become unintentional carriers of the virus. Hariharan moves deftly between the interiority of the film and the circumstances of its making pointing to the democratic low cost and digitized production ethic of the “newgen” films in general. Making do with what is available (a characteristic of post-2011 Egyptian cinema as well in Taha’s study [2020]), a workmanlike and practical Global South aesthetic undergirds this production where the ambition of the film is not connected to the vastness of the budget. The last two essays deal with the question of violence and everyday lives in the Global South bringing in some of the empirical realities of a space characterized by the persistence of colonial damage, the operations of neocolonial capital, as well as the developmental violence practiced by postcolonial elites. Luis Amaya thinks through the imprint of seven decades of urban violence in Colombia on the subaltern body and the experience of a distinct temporality – time without “a horizon of expectations” or fixed referents – that lies athwart the time of the national. The two films discussed here, directed by Ciro Guerra and Ruben Mendoza, deal with precarious lives and their experience of time with all its tempos of acceleration, waiting, emergency, and uncertainty so that cinematic time is mapped on to the temporality of lived lives. Given the shifting horizons of temporality, the present cannot be perceived rationally as a succession of moments; it acquires a dreamlike quality. Guerra’s Wanderer’s Shadow (2004) works also with the idea of disability as a metaphor; the two central characters are bound by the fragility of their bodies as much as haunted by the violence that connects them to each other. Visually, the film draws ironically upon tropes from the Western, the premise of irrational violence being counterpointed by the infructuous masculinity of the protagonists. Ruben’s Stoplight Society (2010) too works with the stuck temporalities of those who panhandle at the traffic lights and the attempts of Raul to work with the time of the transition from red to green; that brief moment when cars and beggars are brought into relation. There is a resistance to continuity, and to verisimilitude and discontinuity reigns as a thread. These films are the delineation of a particular aesthetics, rooted in history and the present, of urban life as experienced by those who are at the margins of narratives of modernity and the nation. Violence is a constant penumbral presence, and it is this premise that inflects the discontinuities of the visual as much as the lack of wholeness in the lives of the characters. Exemplary of the rhythms of life in “our parts of the world,” the experience of temporality in Guerra’s and Ruben’s films is a

20  Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

concatenation of cinematic and real times; time is made visual. Here too, there is a gesture of affiliation with the histories of Third Cinema, and to other landscapes inflected by the dreams and detritus of modernity. The clash and interdependence between objects, bodies, and scapes happens within a space of perennial waiting; the only certainty is the punctuality of violence. The final essay takes us beyond the space of the cinema and its visualization to the exigent question of the environment and its devastation in an era that we have now come to call the Anthropocene, with the caveat that the destruction of nature was not practiced equally by all humans (hence the proliferation of qualifiers like the Capitalocene or indeed, climate Caucasianism). How is cinema to visualize environmental disaster and what does it mean when we speak of the aesthetics of a violent and ugly phenomenon? Slums, in Anthony Obute’s sharp characterization, have become the “apparition” through which we can think of the imbricated nature of the global north and south. Working through the idea of Afro-Asian connections and affinities, Obute reflects on the filiations between Indian and Nigerian cinema in thinking about what are termed naively as environmental accidents. He juxtaposes two films; one on the exploitation of the Niger Delta for oil that renders humans and nature as mere detritus, and the other on the Bhopal gas tragedy, when the intransigent irresponsibility of Union Carbide led a leak of deadly methyl isocyanate from the plant and destroyed lives. This is a cinematic invocation of the “necropolitics” that constantly haunts the aesthetics of the Global South, where slums, oilfields, and chemical plants become the synecdoche for the callousness of a postcolonial modernity. Cinema yet again becomes an enactment of a decolonial aesthetics through the enactment of resistance as a persistent trope within what Obute terms the “Indo-Nigerian cinematic space”. This speaks not only to the circulation of forms of visualization and thematics between “Nollywood” and “Bollywood” but also to governmental endorsement of international legal conventions for the protection of natural and human environments. Here again, we see that a cinematic aesthetics of the Global South is rooted in actual political and experiential filiations across Africa, Asia, and South America that generate the imagery of a common predicament. Obute, like the other authors in this volume, insists on the persistent and intransigent engagement of cinema with the real and the constant elision of cinematic and historical time. Note 1 TERZO stands for the third item in Italian. The word was used in Egypt in describing the back of the orchestra seats (the hall) audience, mostly standing spots for the cheapest price. In the viewing traditions in Egyptian cinemas, the Terzo audience were working-class. They were the most interactive audience. If the Terzo liked the film, they would cheer and clap, if not, they would boo and chant asking for their money back.

Cinemas of the Global South  21

Bibliography Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, Duke University Press. Bordwell, David. (1988). Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Chakravarty, Sumita. 1994. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987. Delhi, Oxford University Press. De Landa, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London, Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema-2: The Time Image. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Devasundaram, Ashvin. 2016. India’s New Independent Cinema: The Rise of the Hybrid. London, Routledge. Eck, Diana. 1981. Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. New York, Columbia University Press. Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Kapur, Geeta. 2000. When was Indian Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. Delhi, Tulika Books. Massumi, Brian. 2015. Politics of Affect. London, Polity. Menon, Dilip. 2018. “Thinking About the Global South: Affinity and Knowledge”, in Russell West-Pavlov ed. The Global South and Literature. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, Duke University Press. Monaco, James. 2011. How to read a film: movies, media, and beyond: art, technology, language, history, theory. Brantford, Ont., W Ross McDonald. Nandy, Ashis. Ed. 1998. The Secret Politics of Our Desire: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema. Delhi, Oxford University Press Prasad, Madhava. 2001. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Reconstruction. Delhi, Oxford University Press. Prashad, Vijay. 2014. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. London, Verso. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 1987. “The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology”. Journal of Arts and Ideas, 14, 15, pp. 47–78. Ray, Satyajit. 2016. The Pather Panchali Sketchbook. Delhi, Harper Collins. Robinson, Andrew. 2022. Satyajit Ray: the Inner Eye. The Biography of a Master Film-maker. London, Bloomsbury. Shafik, Viola. 2003. Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity. Cairo, American University Press. Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. 1970. “Toward a Third Cinema”. Cineaste, 4, 3, pp. 1–10. Srinivas, S.V. 2009. Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N. T Rama Rao. Delhi, Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema.. Delhi, Oxford University Press.

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Stoler, Ann. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Time. Durham, Duke University Press. Taha, Amir. 2020. Film and Counterculture in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising. London, Palgrave Macmillan. Vasudevan, Ravi. 2010. The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema. Delhi, Oxford University Press.

2 SOUTHERN AESTHETICS The Egyptian Way: Shady Abdelsalam’s The Day of Counting the Years (1969) Amir Taha

Shady Abdelsalam’s The Day of Counting the Years (1969) is a leap from classical Egyptian realism to a short-lived unique style of cinema. Being the only long feature of film of Shady Abdelsalam, this film had opened up a new horizon of Egyptian cinematic aesthetics. This film, I argue, is an example of what could have been a starting point for a then new line of creativity, a virtuality of sorts. However, Shady Abelsalam passed away before being able to make another long feature. His second film would have been Ikhnaton. I claim that The Day of Counting the Years represents, as does Al Azima (Selim, 1939), what we can call a southern aesthetics. Abdelsalam Salam’s film is based on real events. In 1881 the tribe of Horabat had been investigated for illegal trade in pharaonic monuments. The villagers of al Quarna in Upper Egypt had discovered more than fifty royal mummies of the Twenty-first Dynasty. Over generations, the tribe had been systematically pillaging archaeological booty, and treasures from the tombs began appearing on the world’s antiquities markets. The film tells the story of Wanis, the son of the Horabat leader in the mountain village of Qurna who discovers after his father’s death the secret of the royal mummies and his family trade in pharaonic monuments. Wanis is conflicted about this secret, and the film portrays this inner conflict as well as his conflict with his family. In terms of the story, Abdelsalam engages in a process of historiography in which he re-appropriates history and even rewrites it. The Day of Counting the Years deviates from the true story in which the sons of the tribal leader had been the biggest monument traders in Egypt. The film portrays the two brothers refusing to engage in such business. The older son is killed by the tribe’s elders and the younger son, Wanis, ends up informing the authorities about the royal mummies. The Egyptologist who arrives at the mountain to DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832-2

24  Amir Taha

investigate the matter is an Egyptian. In reality, it was the German Egyptologist Emil Brugsch, as there were no Egyptian archaeologists or Egyptologists at the time. Abdelsalam chose to give the role of Maspero, the famous French Egyptologist, to an Egyptian actor speaking in high Arabic. This can be seen as a sort of counter to Western cinema which at that time, and partly until now, gives the roles of Arab characters to Western actors. Maspero, though, appears only at the opening of the film. The world we travel into is that of the mountain, its people, and its memory. The film connects Egypt’s forgotten past to its present. Ancient Egyptian history and culture is completely unknown to most Egyptians. The film also links ancient Egypt to the film’s tribal present in the village of Quarna and to the urban culture of Cairo represented by the Egyptian Egyptologist. This film is the only Egyptian film which visually and conceptually engages with pharaonic Egypt. This film is about memory discovered – by those who unknowingly live in it yet are out of it, and even divorced from it. Formally, the film chooses to present its dialogue in high Arabic instead of a demotic Egyptian. This creates both an effect and an affect of alienation and mystique. In terms of production, Abdelsalam was the first Egyptian auteur; he wrote, did the art production, and directed the film. Abdelsalam was also a fine-artist; he drew each frame of each scene in a visual storyboard. The rhythm of the film is slow and subtle, and the image is the main vehicle, not the action nor the movement. It is a distant, almost a foreign world of mystery, secrets and the ancient dead: a world of various pasts. But it is also a world so real and so close in its poverty and its psychology, a world of urgent presents. In the following, I shall discuss two scenes from the film in relation to the notion of southern aesthetics. Shady Abdelsalam: An Unfinished Greatness

Analyzing this film, the first and last feature of Shady Abdelsalam, one cannot avoid the visual aesthetics. Abdelsalam was a fine-artist, painter, sculptor, art director, costume designer, photographer, writer, and director. He worked in Egyptian cinema as well as in international cinema as an art director, set designer, and assistant director. Abdelsalam worked in Egypt with Salah Abu Seif, the second-generation realist following Kamal Selim, Henri Barakat, the director of many Egyptian classics, and Youssef Chahine, the most internationally renowned Egyptian filmmaker. Internationally, he was the costume designer and one of the set designers in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1964). In 1965, he was assigned by the Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz as a consultant for the historical set and costume designs of the Pharaoh. In 1967 he designed the decor and costumes of the documentary Mankind’s Fight for Survival by the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. It was Rossellini who encouraged and even urged Abdelsalam to become a director. In fact, The Day of Counting the Years, which Abdelsalam wrote, was to have been directed by Rossellini, who later became the film’s producer along with Abdelsalam.

Southern Aesthetics  25

Abdelsalam was preoccupied with ancient Egyptian history, not only in terms of the artistic, but more so in terms of the historical discontinuity when it comes to the so-called pharaonic times. This phase of Egyptian history, being the birth of what we know now as Egypt (Greek, Latin), Misr (Hebrew, Arabic), and before that K.mt or Kemet (Hieroglyphic), is alienated from almost all Egyptians. The reasons behind that vary and are too complicated to be discussed here. However, it must be said that all that ancient Egypt represents for Egyptians are the monuments. A deeper or even a general knowledge about the language, the costumes, the culture, and, of course, the history is absent. For sure, the colonial era played a big role in this outcome, starting with the French invasion/campaign of Egypt (1798–1801), whose accompanying Scientific Expedition of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts discovered the Rosetta Stone and finally deciphered the hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone was later captured by the British in 1801 along with all the stolen artifacts the French had taken. Thus, the discipline of Egyptology came into being in Europe and became a monopoly of Westerners who sent their archaeological expeditions and continue to do so in the present. Nevertheless, the different state regimes throughout the recent history of Egyptian were never concerned with establishing the tools to integrate the knowledge of the ancient history in the sociocultural or even the academic spheres. Whether this was due to a lack of interest, or due to ideological reasons which began with the ideas of both pan-Arabism and the Islamic revival as the main two strains of identity politics since the 1930s, remains to be explored. Shady Abdelsalam observed this fact, and soon his interest in the ancient Egyptian art turned into an artistic and an intellectual cause. His involvement in both the foreign films he worked on, such as Cleopatra and Pharaoh, made him realize both the cultural and historical gap in Egypt in relation to ancient Egypt as well as the knowledge monopoly, the fascination, and the passion of the West for this ancient civilization. The people who lived on this land, on the two banks of the Nile and in the mountains, are entirely disconnected from this ancient past that runs into the present and partially defines the lives, the costumes, the language, and the culture of Egyptians until this very day. Even when looking at the literature, music and all the other arts in Egypt since the nineteenth century, one would find only a handful of works which deal or are influenced by this era. When looking at Shady Abdelsalam’s short cinematic career, we will find that six of his eight films – a feature, six shorts and a docudrama, and an unfinished feature – have ancient Egypt as their subject matter. Abdelsalam’s last unfinished project, The Tragedy of the Great House, also known as Akhenaten, had been in the making for ten years until his death. This project could not be realized due to Abdelsalam’s insistence that the financing of this film had to be Egyptian. He rejected various high budget offers from France. Abdelsalam argued that a film about Egyptian history must be funded with

26  Amir Taha

Egyptian money. This might seem to be a sort of idealism or even naïve nationalism on Abdelsalam’s part. In fact, this position was entirely in tune with his preoccupation with connecting Egyptians with this part of their history, not only in terms of perception, but also in terms of production. Producing such a high budget historical epic in Egypt with Egyptian funding and production would have involved nothing less than the involvement of the Center of National Cinema and the Culture Ministry along with private production companies. Furthermore, a huge number of artists and workers would have had the opportunity to be part of this project, which would have had benefited them on many levels, whether, in the engagement with knowledge about Egyptian history, in gaining practical and artistic experience working on such a huge project, or in opening a space for future projects of the same caliber. Most importantly, in Abdelsalam’s mind, producing this film with non-Egyptian money would have run the risk of influencing the vision of the film: a vision which Abdelsalam wanted to be Egyptian from a point of view and with the money of Egyptians. The film at hand, The Day of Counting the Years, produced in 1968 and released in 1969, is a milestone in Egyptian cinema. The film is a testimony of Abdelsalam’s artistic project in relation to the history of ancient Egypt, but importantly in terms of cinema, it is a testimony of his visual and fine-art background. This film is the first in Egyptian cinema to rely entirely on the image as the main vehicle of its narrative. In the following, I argue that this film can be seen as presenting the notion of Egyptian aesthetics in particular, and it can be read as a part of cinematic southern aesthetics in the broader sense. Reading of Southern Aesthetics

The actual start of the film is prior to the opening credits. It opens with the face of the coffin of Queen Tiye, also referred to as the “Amarna Cache,” with its one sightless eye. An Arabic script of a quotation of a passage from the Book of the Dead appears (Figure 2.1):

FIGURE 2.1 Opening

credits.

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You who go, you will return; You who sleep, you will rise, You who walk, you will be resurrected, For glory is due to you, To the heavens and their loftiness, To the earth and its breadth, To the seas and their depth. Following the opening credits, a voice reads another passage from the Book of the Dead as the camera shows a funerary papyrus (Figure 2.2). The voice reads, “May you be obeyed, Lord of Light. You who live in the heart of the great house. Prince of night and darkness. I have come to you as a pure soul. Grant me a mouth that I may speak in your presence.” The film cross dissolves to a wide shot (Figure 2.3); the reader of these words stands reading to a small group of people who are sitting by a large table on which a lamp occupies the center. The man goes on, “Bring me my heart quickly on the day the clouds become heavy, and the darkness thickens.” The camera pans into the group

FIGURE 2.2 The

ancient Egyptian text.

FIGURE 2.3 Wide

shot of Maspero reading the script.

28  Amir Taha

and the film cuts to a medium shot of another man completing the passage (Figure 2.4), “Give me my name in the great house, and return my name to memory, on the day when the years are counted” (00:03:15–00:04:05). The scene cuts back to the first reader; the standing figure who says, “a distant echo from distant Thebes, three thousand years ago” (00:04:10). Soon, the spectator is informed that this is a meeting of the Department of Antiquities, whose head is Gaston Maspero (Figure 2.5). Maspero tells the group that some antiquities which belong to the Twenty-first Dynasty had been found in the black market. The place of the tombs of this Dynasty remains unknown to the department, and the mission of unveiling the secret location of these tombs must begin. Maspero argues that it is clear the tombs are somewhere in the vicinity of the Mountain of the Dead, and the only way to find them is by investigating the tribe of Horabat. Ahmad Effendi (Figure 2.4) asks to join the force and see to the investigation himself, to which Maspero agrees.

FIGURE 2.4 Introduction

of Ahmad Effendi completing the passage.

FIGURE 2.5 Introduction

of Maspero.

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Several aspects need to be addressed here; first, the cinematic/visual representation. The film chooses to start with the hieroglyphic text while the reading voice is offscreen: a voice-off. The hieroglyphic is a pictorial scripture, a written language of image. The ancient Egyptian civilization has the visual at its core: murals, obelisks, temples, statues, and pyramids. Indeed, all these artifacts consist of various dimensions: architecture, sculpture, cosmology, mathematics, and of course, geometry. Still, the dominant mode is visuality, and this is true of history as well. The reading of the history of ancient Egypt is predominantly visual. The Day of Counting the Years is a film whose narration is driven by the image: the composition of shots, camera work, lighting, and the editing. The choice of high Arabic as the language of the dialogue plays a significant role in the overall body of the film which I will discuss later, but the visual dimension is what this film relies on. This is in tune with the visual dimension of ancient Egypt being the core of the story (Hammam, 2007). Johnston (2013) argues that the image of Queen Tiye is “an appropriate and well-chosen opening image. Eyes, ancient and modern appear throughout the film, they are an element … which is … sign-posted from the outset.” Eyes in the film are a leitmotif which has to do with the notion of heritage, history, the psychological state of characters, and the idea of observation. Later in the film, the elders of the Horabat tribe reveal the secret of their enterprise to the sons of the deceased leader. The artifact they choose to take out of one of the coffins is an Eye of Horus (wedjet). The eye in Egyptian mythology stands for action, protection, and wrath. The Eye of Horus is also used for several metaphors such as, “Eye of the Mind, Third Eye, Eye of the Truth or Insight, the Eye of God Inside the Human Mind” (Refaey et al. 2019). The eye which is taken out of the coffin in the film can also be seen as the cause for the discovery of the tombs, and as the end of the Horabat’s illegal enterprise. Furthermore, the camera throughout the film shows the eyes of the characters whether in close-ups or in American shots, specially, Wanis’s, the main protagonist of the film. Abdelsalam sets the tone of the film from the very beginning; even before the opening credits, as discussed above. With the end of the opening credits, the camera shows the funerary papyrus, as Maspero reads a passage from the Book of the Dead which includes the title of the film: The Day of Counting the Years. The editing technique of cross-dissolve between the papyrus and the members of the Department of Antiquities establishes the notion of travel through both, albeit conceptual, space and time. The three worlds the film moves across are existent in the present: the ancient world embodied in objects (the papyrus, the coffins, the Eye of Horus); the urban world represented by Ahmad Effendi and the quest to stop the looting of the ancient artifacts; and finally, the world of Wanis, the younger son of the Horabat’s leader who lives an inner conflict regarding the secret of his tribe. Wanis’s

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world is where the events of the film take place: the rough and almost desolate life of the mountain with its rigid traditions. The journey to Wanis’s world is a journey in time as well and what connects the other two worlds: Ahmad’s and the Horabat’s. The heritage of ancient Egypt for Ahmad Effendi is spiritual and continuous. It is his own past whose mysteries are to be discovered and known. For the Horabat, this heritage is physical and material. Later in the film, one of the elders says that these mummies are of those who lived thousands of years ago with unknown fathers and forefathers, and these treasures of the mountain belong to the tribe since their discovery by the tribe’s forefathers. Here, we see Abdelsalam’s insight. The Horabat tribe consider themselves part of history separate from that of ancient Egypt. These mummies have a different history; they are remnants of a distant obscure past that is not theirs. The film tries to formulate these ideas visually. After the cross-dissolve to Maspero and his group, the camera shows them in a wide shot, then it pans in a very slow pace toward Maspero reading from the papyrus. The scene takes place at night; it is an external scene: the background is dark, and the main source of light is the lamp that is in the middle of the table. The slow camera pace and the extended long takes are what define the film visually along with Abdelsalam’s unique scene blocking and composition. It is worthy of mention that Abdelsalam painted a visual storyboard of the whole film. However, these visual aspects do not just serve an over-stylized aesthetics for the sake of an aesthetic image. Rather, the unique cinematography by the great Abdelaziz Fahmy and Mostafa Imam creates a visual dimension of mystery, distant observation, and characters’ psychology in relation to the notions of time and space. The camera pans to Maspero while he reads the text. The voice of the reader changes while Maspero is still in the frame, then the film cuts to Ahmad Effendi. It is his voice now which completes the text: “Give me my name in the great house, and return my name to memory, on the day when the years are counted” (00:03:15–00:04:05). Here, the film engages in the main act of historiography, the act of writing history. The incident of discovering the tombs took place in 1881, and Maspero was then the head of the Department of Antiquities. However, at that time, no Egyptian worked at the department; there had been no Egyptian Egyptologists. The whole text from the Book of the Dead is a spell of the resurrection of the dead. According to Johnston, Abdelsalam chose this particular text to refer to “self-remembrance and self-identification. It is obvious that Abdelsalam believes Egypt to have become lost and it is the young Egyptologist Kamal who will assist in its rediscovery” (2013). The discovery of the Deir El Bahary Cache was done under the supervision of Maspero himself, who traveled to Qurna, and it was Emil Brugsch, the German Egyptologist and Maspero’s assistant, who physically discovered the cache after one of the Abdelrasul brothers led him to the location.

Southern Aesthetics  31

In this sense, Ahmad Effendi is a fictional character who according to Johnston might very well resemble Shady Abdelsalam himself (Johnston 2013). In any case, Abdelsalam gives the task of history and its unveiling to an Egyptian young man. First, Ahmad reads the last passage of the resurrection spell. Ahmad is the one who summons the ancient past into the present, and he himself becomes a part of the act of remembrance for the time to come. As Maspero explains, the reading and the repetition of this papyrus restores the ability of the dead to remember their name. Any soul that lacks a name wanders in endless toil. Losing one’s name is losing one’s identity (00:04:15–00:04:40). Second, Abdelsalam omits the real historical figure, Brugsch, and replaces it with Ahmad and gives him the role of leading the expedition to Qurna. Furthermore, following the first scene, Maspero never appears again in the film. This act of historiography follows what Paul Smethurst defines as “historical time” in its ‘postmodern’ guise. In The Postmodern Chronotope (2001), he defines Historical Time “as chronology, elapsed and completed time, and records of the past, but chronological data are often reordered and reformed to suit demands of present-day society; as narrative, no longer the time of history, but of writing history – historiographic time” (Smethurst, 2001). Abdelsalam here offers an alternative writing of history in a mode of historiography which is not concerned with the hegemonic chronology of events, but with their virtuality. The editing of these two shots – cutting from Maspero to Ahmad – adds to the notion of historiography. Abdelsalam uses a visual abrupt cut in which Ahmad appears in a medium shot while the preceding shot is a wide shot where Maspero is not shown in detail, but as a part of the group (Figures 2.3 and 2.4). The first time the spectator sees Maspero closely is in the shot that follows Ahmad finishing reading the spell (Figure 2.5). By presenting Ahmad in a medium shot, occupying the frame, he is the first character the spectator sees up and close; not Maspero. By reciting the last part of the spell along with the visual representation and later in this sequence, by being granted the leadership of the expedition, it is Ahmad who will restore the soul of the dead, and thus, their identity and place in history as well as in the present. Ahmad is an Egyptian who writes a chapter of Egyptian history in the film, and Shady Abdelsalam is the one who rewrites this history through his film. The act of historiography does not stop here with the character of Ahmad Effendi. It goes further with Wanis and his older brother in Qurna. The real story of the discovery of Deir El Bahary is that the three Abdelrasul brothers – Ahmad, Soliman, and Mohammad – were dealing with the antiquities black market after they discovered the tombs. Ahmad Abdelrasul was arrested after Maspero and Brugsch arrived. Later Mohammad, the elder brother, was also arrested. The two brothers were imprisoned and tortured in order to reveal the location of the tombs with no avail. However, with continued

32  Amir Taha

pressure and a promise of amnesty, Mohammad Abdelrasul finally revealed the secret of the tombs (Bickerstaffe 2005). In the film, there are two brothers: Wanis, the younger, and the older brother who remains unnamed. They are the sons of the tribe’s leader, and their uncles reveal the secret of the tombs to them. The older brother is outraged by the tribe’s enterprise and refuses to take part. He decides to leave the village. The tribe’s elders fear that their nephew will reveal the secret to the authorities and conspire to kill him. They succeed in their plot, and it is Wanis now who remains in the village. The secret torments him. Finally, Wanis decides to inform the authorities about the tombs. The portrayal of the two brothers in the film along with Ahmad’s character form a triangle which represents Abdelsalam’s idea of the owning of Egyptian history by Egyptians. The conflict in the Horabat tribe is between Wanis and his brother on the one hand and the tribe’s elders on the other: the young and the old. In a confrontation between the older brother and his uncles, the young man raises the question of conscience and morality. He claims that knowing about the secret is a sin and not knowing is also a sin. The two elders tell their nephew that his speech is that of the Effendis. They say that this enterprise is what feeds the tribe, and this is their way of life. The young man replies, “this way of life is a poison in my body. This is the life of hyenas” (00:23:46). As for Wanis, his inner conflict builds up throughout the film until the point when he decides to reveal the secret. Wanis’s inner conflict goes beyond the moral aspect. Wanis is trapped between the past and the present; memory and being. Furthermore, Wanis is the only character in the film who seems to have a personal connection to the monuments in the mountain. In a later scene, he meets a stranger near one of the temples who asks him if the statues, the pillars, and the faces ever scared him. Wanis tells him, “They were the friends of our childhood. My brother and I used to play here and hide” (00:41:58–00:42.12). Visually, Wanis is always shown in and surrounded by the ancient monuments. The film makes him a natural part of this environment: the temple, the pillars, and the murals. In addition, the film expresses Wanis’s entrapment visually by showing him repeatedly in corridors, narrow stairways, and lanes (Figure 2.8). Wanis also remains for the largest part of the film a passive observer, and through his eyes the film unfolds. The confrontation between Wanis’s brother and the elders is one example of this visual representation. The wide shots of the brother, his mother, and the two elders are shot from Wanis’s point of view. The sequence starts with Wanis going down the narrow stairs, and when the three characters start their dialogue, Wanis stops and watches (Figures 2.6, 2.7, 2.9, and 2.10). In this sequence the film cuts four times between Wanis’s gaze and the four characters. Wanis’s POV reveals the conflict among the characters through which the mise-en-scène shows a spatial separation between the brother and the elders. In the first wide shot

Southern Aesthetics  33

FIGURE 2.6 The

spatial separation between the brother and the elders.

FIGURE 2.7 Close-up

FIGURE 2.8 Wanis

of the brother.

watching and listening to the revelation of the family secret: visual expression of Wanis’s entrapment.

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FIGURE 2.9  Wanis’s

POV. In the progression of the conflict, Wanis’s brother is now occupying the left half of the frame.

FIGURE 2.10 Wanis

standing in the narrow stairs revealing a sense of him being trapped.

(Figure 2.6), the brother is in the right half of the frame while the elders are on the left. The mother who remains silent for the most part of the sequence is in the center of the frame. The brother remains in the right half while challenging his uncles and refusing to take part in their enterprise. The sequence cuts to several medium shots of the brother and the elders during their heated argument, taking the perspective of the debating characters. The mise-en-scène of this whole sequence in general and the wide shots (Wanis’s POV) reveal the division, the conflict, and the relations of power among the characters. In the wide shots in which the brother is positioned in the right half of the frame, he is, first, in a position of moral superiority toward the elders and second, he is their equal, as all the three characters have the same size within the frame. The change to the medium shots maintains this relation of power until the end of the sequence, when the blocking and the mise-en-scène change (Figure 2.9). Now the two elders occupy the right half of the frame and

Southern Aesthetics  35

are closer to the camera, thus bigger in size, while the brother occupies the left half: distant and smaller. Here, the relations of power change. The brother insists on refusing to obey the elders and rejects them, and shortly after, the elders end their visit by addressing the mother and paying their condolences: “May God give you the strength to bear your fate” (00:25:46). It is the elders now who have the upper hand and the control of this situation. Thus, they are placed in the right half of the frame while the brother is in the left. Later, the elders kill the brother, and the sequence at hand is a foreshadowing of the coming events mainly visually, but also verbally in their words to the mother. As for the mother, the film places her in the center of the frame and in the middle of the argument. Visually, specifically in Wanis’s POV, she is a mirroring of her younger son. She too is trapped between the opposing parties: her older son and the brothers of her late husband. Johnston argues that his composition is yet another mirroring device, of Isis being caught between Horus and Set (Johnston 2013). However, this is very far-fetched and even inaccurate. Isis was never passive or torn apart between Set, her husband’s murderer, and her son Horus. The mother in the film and in this sequence is the connection between the two worlds: the traditional one represented by the elders and the young rebellious son. Her passivity during the heated debate stops when the elders imply that their nephew had not been raised to respect the tribe’s tradition. The mother objects: The Mother: that is enough! I am the one who raised my sons. I raised them to be proud and to stand tall like the mountain. An Elder: and we do not accept to be insulted in our brother’s house. It is still his house, or so I hope. The Brother: only its wall. The Mother: the walls and whom the walls protect. (00:24:57–00:25:15) The above-discussed examples show the conceptual as well as technical characteristics of Abdelsalam’s film. In terms of aesthetics which are organically related to the content and the ideas in and behind it, the film attempts to create Egyptian aesthetics through certain filmic devices. What I mean by Egyptian here is not merely a notion of national or nationalist cinema; rather it is the appropriation of a specific cinematic aesthetics in relation to the subject matter of the film. For instance, the use of slow camera movement, long takes, and minimal dialogue in 1969 is not necessarily unique to Shady Abdelsalam but also found in the Italian neorealist cinema and in Ozu’s cinema long before the Italians. However, Italian neorealism was predominantly preoccupied with the social in relation to the notions of physical reality and/ or Andre Bazin’s functionalism. Ozu’s cinema is best perceived in terms of what Deleuze (1985) described as opsigns and sonsigns yet also in relation to

36  Amir Taha

the social reality in Japan. Abdelsalam’s film utilizes these filmic devices differently. The Day of Counting the Years is not a realist film; on the contrary, the film can be very much described as an expressionist film with an air of science fiction, which is executed in a neorealist filmic aesthetics. In terms of content, the film tackles the notions of history, identity, and remembrance in a unique Egyptian setting. The film moves between three temporalities: 1 The time of ancient Egypt: which remains unpresented/unshown in the film, yet it is embedded in the narrative, whether through Ahmad Effendi’s world, through Wanis’s world in the mountain, or through the artifacts, the statues, and the monuments. 2 The time of Cairo: that is in the beginning of the film: the time of urban Egypt in the nineteenth century. This temporality also exists in Wanis’s world in the mountain, as Ahmad Effendi moves to Qurna in his attempt to uncover the mystery. 3 The time of the Horabat: Wanis’s temporality in which he embarks on a journey of conflict, disillusionment, rebellion, and in fact, a coming of age. In this world, Wanis is the equivalent of Ahmad Effendi. Both represent the perpetual temporality of Egypt, whether visually or conceptually. By visually, I mean the physical appearance of the two characters; yet another filmic device which belongs to the realist cinema. In Deleuze’s Cinema 2 (1985), he argues that in the case of neorealist films, “the only things that count are the choices of actors according to their physical … appearance.” Both actors, Mohammad Khairy (Ahmad Effendi) and Ahmad Marei (Wanis) resemble in their appearance the figures in ancient Egyptian paintings. Abdelsalam deliberately depicts the two characters, especially Wanis, in close-ups. Conceptually, the two characters are the only ones who have a spiritual link to the ancient times, Ahmad Effendi as a passionate Egyptologist, and Wanis as a part of the environment of the mountain. So, how can this film be perceived in the light of cinematic southern aesthetics? I argue that the three characteristics of southern aesthetics are a process of decolonialization and deterritorialization, resistance, and affect. The Day of Counting the Years engages in decolonializing history in cinema, as it is the first Egyptian production which has ancient Egypt as its subject matter. Furthermore, in terms of content, the film, in deploying a process of historiography, decolonizes history itself. The French and the German Egyptologists are non-existent in the film; instead, Egyptians are the ones who own ancient history. Ahmad Effendi is the deterritorialization of Emil Burgsch: an agent of the virtual as opposed to the actual. The two brothers are not the “criminals” who, under imprisonment and torture, reveal the secret of the cache. The older brother in the film pays his life for refusing to live on the dead, “the

Southern Aesthetics  37

living of hyenas.” Wanis reveals the secret to Ahmad Effend out of conviction. This process of historiography – the writing of history – is also a process of resistance. To decolonize is to resist the hegemony of history as much as a hierarchal concept of territorialization, control, and power. On the notion of decolonialization, Walid El Khashab (2017) argues that the film reproduces an image of Egyptians in the nineteenth century, faced with an accelerated, state-sponsored, imported process of modernization. They are a people at the threshold of modernity, at odds with the power of the modern nation-state—police and inspectors of the Antiquities Authority— who encounter the modern knowledge of the science of anthropology, and who collectively reorganize their lives. This people is somehow cut from its historical roots, given that it has no knowledge of the magnitude of the pharaonic civilization. Yet it has no means to rival this past glory. These are precisely the terms of the crisis endured by many peoples in the phase of decolonization. Wanis’s journey of inner conflict is a process of re-owning the roots he is cut off from. This also very well corresponds with Foucault’s idea of archaeology of knowledge (1972). Wanis becomes a line of continuity between his present and the ancient past as well as of history itself only by embodying its discontinuity and rupture. So does the actual and physical act of archaeology that is the digging and the discovery of artifacts and monuments. However, this film as such can be seen as an exemplar of Foucault’s method, for “it does not seek to rediscover the continuous, insensible transition that relates discourses, on a gentle slope, to what precedes them, surrounds them, or follows them”; rather, it defines “discourses in their specificity” (1972). The film is a new speaker that speaks for and to a virtual Egypt as opposed to the conventional speaker: the Egyptologist/the colonizer whose discourse speaks for himself and to the concepts of science and history in the modernist sense. Visually, The Day of Counting the Years translates the ideas and the concepts significantly. The camera work of Abdel Aziz Fahmy is what creates the atmosphere of secrecy, mystery, and the three different temporalities I discussed earlier. As we talk about neorealist visual devices, we should not forget the southern cinemas which preceded the European/Italian neorealism. In the case of Egypt, Kamal Selim’s Al Azima stands as a milestone of the realist cinema worldwide. Fahmy’s long career extended from 1949 until 1986, during which he worked with heavyweight directors such as Salah Abu Seilf; Kamal Selim’s student and the second-generation realist, Tawfik Saleh; Youssef Chahine; Saeid Marzouk; and Hussein Kamal. Fahmy’s cinematography in The Day of Counting the Years is the main force of the narrative along with Abdelsalam’s mise-en-scène and blocking. Abdelsalam drew a visual storyboard of all the film’s scenes, and the cinematography brought it to motion

38  Amir Taha

picture. In terms of decolonialization in relation to the visual dimension, the whole visual work adds to the content’s process of decolonialization. The entire artwork and art direction are done by Shady Abdelsalam himself, yet another precedent in films which depicts Egypt’s ancient history. Thus, the film’s world with all its dimensions – ideas, content, subject matter, and visuality– are purely Egyptian. It is important to say here that in the few readings by Western scholars (Gamblin 2015, Johnston 2013), and even Egyptian scholars such as Walid El Khashab (2017), of Shady Abdelsalam’s cinematic project, the idea of nationalism is widely discussed, and even argued to be the main core. These scholars see the presence and the “reinvention” of ancient Egypt in this film as an attempt to redefine the identity of Egypt by replacing the Arabic Islamic identity with what they call pharaonic. Walid El Khashab (2017) goes even further in his reading of the film by arguing that the film is an example of what he calls sub-imperialism. He argues that the modern urban archaeologist exerts power over settlers of nomadic Bedouin origin because he holds both the knowledge of ancient Egyptian history and is part of the modern bureaucracy based in the capital. The film is set in a state in which Egypt endures European hegemony: the film’s opening sequence features the French archaeologist translating the hieroglyphs inscribed on a papyrus to his Egyptian employees. Yet Egypt reproduces this imperial hegemonic power dynamic with an othered segment of its indigenous population: the settlers recently arrived from non-agricultural regions in Upper Egypt. I would argue that in this passage, El Khashab rushes to implement a critical reading of the film in which he misreads certain aspects. First, and as I discussed earlier, Ahmad Effendi is a fictional character that the film created in relation to the notion of historiography. Second, the Horabat tribe is not a nomadic tribe; they inhabit the mountain in Luxor, Upper Egypt. The tribe has inhabited the vicinity of the Necropolis as far back as the thirteenth century (van der Spek 2011). Third, the idea of the Horabat tribe as indigenous as opposed to the archaeologist as urban, thus non-indigenous, is simply inaccurate, and is deployed only to support the claim that the character of Ahmad Effendi represents “sub-imperialism.” In fact, the categorization of the tribe as both settlers and indigenous is contradictory. The real historical events can indeed be discussed in the context of the Egyptian modern state engaging in a process of territorialization, reterritorialization, and capture when it comes to the inhabitants of this area. However, this is exactly what the film does not do. Rather, Wanis is portrayed as an organic part of his environment which is in turn an organic line of the ancient history that exists in the present. Furthermore, one must perceive Shady Abdelsalam’s whole cinematic project, which includes six films which deal with ancient Egypt, to

Southern Aesthetics  39

realize that the notions of pharaonicism and/or nationalism are by no means evident. Finally, to this point, the choice of high Arabic as the language of the film is yet another device which serves the idea of the continuity of Egyptian history and culture. The film does not choose, for instance, to deliver the reading of the papyrus in high Arabic and the dialogue in common Egyptian as a sign of the superiority or grandeur of the ancient past; rather, the whole film is spoken in high Arabic with its poeticism. The last aspect of southern aesthetics that is evident in this film is the idea of affect. Affect in The Day of Counting the Years is both internal, that is existent in the world of the film, and external in the sense of the interrelation between production and perception. Both levels are intertwined and not separable. Inside the world of the film, the characters, especially Wanis, are constantly in a process of affect, that is an “intensity” which indicates non-conscious and unnamed, yet registered experiences of bodily energy and intensity that arise in response to stimuli impinging on the body (Massumi 2002). One of the examples of this is when Wanis watches the elders cutting one of the mummies open and plucking the Eye of Horus out of its body (00:18:17–00:18:23). Affect in cinema is of the image; that is the pre-thought, as Deleuze argues. Thus, the process of affect in this sequence is purely an audiovisual image: sonsign and opsign. The editing in this sequence along with the sound design creates a process of affect on both levels: in the filmic world in which Wanis’s body experiences an intensity in response to what he sees. The elders’ actions are shot from Wanis’s POV. He watches them opening the tomb and cutting the mummy (Figure 2.11); the film cuts to his face and his bodily energy and intensity in response to the act of the elders (Figures 2.12 and 2.13); the scene cuts again to the elders trying to pull out the Eye of Horus, now using an axe and cutting off the head and finally pulling out the artifact. One of the elders hands it to the other, who holds it high showing it to the two brothers, but still, it is all from Wanis’s point of view.

FIGURE 2.11 The

elder cuts out the Mummy.

40  Amir Taha

FIGURE 2.12 Reaction

FIGURE 2.13 The

shot: Wanis’s shock.

Eye of Horus at the centre of the frame.

FIGURE 2.14  Wanis

after running from the cave and alone on the top of the mountain.

In this long take, the eye becomes the center of the image; its main force, occupying the largest part of the frame and looking directly to Wanis/the camera (Figure 2.14). The elder who is carrying the eye moves to the right, and with him Wanis. This is shown in an over-the-shoulder shot, but the

Southern Aesthetics  41

camera stays in the same position. Wanis moves right and stands now at the opening of the cave. This movement is registered visually through the elder’s eye-line and the brief movement of Wanis. Suddenly, the elder looks toward where Wanis is now located and the torches go out, the frame is black, and the film cuts to a low-angle wide shot of Wanis on the top of the mountain (Figure 2.14). The sound design of this whole sequence builds up a feeling of suspense, mystery, and discomfort by employing sharp notes of strings which gradually build up to a crescendo accompanied by heavy percussion as the elder tells the older brother to bring the eye to the merchant. The film shows Wanis in this sequence only one time in his facial response. The following sequence starts with him alone standing on the top of the mountain: his figure is small and completely engulfed by the night sky and the mountain. What took place is not shown: he threw down the torches and ran out of the cave. This is the second response to the unveiling of the secret. The first affective process (his face) is physically audiovisual, while the second one is an unseen audiovisual image which takes place in the black screen: the in-between. These opsigns and sonsigns create a process of affect on both levels: production and perception and which cannot be integrated neither as pure objective nor pure subjective frames (Deleuze 1985). Conclusion

In this chapter, I have explored the concept of the Global South in relation to Egyptian cinema. The southern assemblage as a conceptual notion, I argue, can be perceived as an assemblage of decolonialization, deterritorialization, resistance, and affect. Cinema in this context is a smaller assemblage which is a part of the larger one: the Global South. This smaller assemblage can be very well considered as a micro example of how the southern assemblage is and how it operates. If we, the southern scholars, are serious about not reproducing in the term, Global South, northern colonial nuances, I believe that the process of knowledge production is vital. The very fact of the whole idea of the Global South as a productive paradox in the possible guise of a trojan horse of the North is in my view an important and helpful start point in the path of knowledge production. I tried to show how the cinemas of the south with the example of Egypt have been one of the lines of decolonialization, deterritorialization, and resistance from the very early days of cinema. Along with the three characteristics, the notion of affect is also evident in which the relationship between the mode of production and that of perception had been unique in the south, especially up until the early second half of the twentieth century. The touring cinemas in India, Egypt, Brazil, and Nigeria and the establishment of improvisational cinema screenings across these countries were much more than entertainment. They were an act of communal cultural, social, and even political activities related to the idea of creating smooth spaces and spaces of affect.

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As for the mode of production, what is strikingly common among these countries which were under colonial rule is that the so-called national cinemas had been established as early as the invention of the motion picture itself. We see how one of the global cinematic pioneers, V. Shantaram, created Indian cinema as early as 1921, and how he created unique cinematic aesthetics which went on to influence cinema over decades. The same is true with Egypt’s Kamal Selim, whose realism preceded European/Italian neorealism and established a long tradition of realist and neorealist cinema in Egypt. In the 1960s, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino wrote the groundbreaking text Towards Third Cinema, which is the first cinematic manifesto of and from the south. They went on to make films which, away from the north-centric landscape, created one of the most unique cinemas which truly spoke of and to the realities of the south. Even though the two pioneers rejected the notion of aesthetics as embedded in the western/northern paradigm, their work produced aesthetics of liberation, resistance, and decolonialization (Solanas and Getino, 1970). Thus, Solanas’s and Getino’s cinema is a line in the southern aesthetics assemblage. Southern aesthetics is a concept that is in tune with and, in fact, of the notions of liberation, resistance, and decolonialization. I argued that the terms virtuality, creativity, entanglement, and affect are what make the concept of aesthetics in relation to the south not an abstract or a borrowed element. Rather, aesthetics is not separable from the political, the social, the historical, and the cultural. Southern aesthetics rejects the northern division of high and low, of the hierarchy of taste and of the rigid division between the commercial and the artistic. Aesthetics in the southern sense is created, discovered, rediscovered, mutated, and bent. Cinema as such is heterogeneous, an assemblage of arts, technology, politics, and concepts. Southern aesthetics is of the same mode as the concept of the Global South itself: a virtuality of creativity, mutation, and affect. This chapter discussed Shady Abdelsalam’s The Day of Counting the Years as an example of southern aesthetics that is not abstract but, rather, very real in its virtuality. The Egyptian filmmaker engaged in a process of decolonialization and resistance by which he created a historiographical mode of artistic production. The Egyptian aesthetics in this film is as material as the film reel itself. This aesthetics is found in the settings, the costumes, and the art direction, which are not only specific to the time of the events – the nineteenth century – but also to the overall mood of the film and in relation to its characters. The choice of actors as well is important in terms of bodily features and their resemblance to the ancient Egyptian portrayals. Also, the formal and stylistic visual representation in relation to the subject matter is a strong example of the organic role of aesthetics as being non-separable from the content. In the spirit of southern cinematic tradition, Abdelsalam utilizes the Italian neorealist filmic devices of mise-en-scène, long

Southern Aesthetics  43

takes, and slow/minimalistic camera movement in an audiovisual work that is far off from being a realist/neorealist film. This is done in the year 1969, during the height of the second phase of Italian neorealism. In other words, it is an artistic act of creativity, mutation, and decolonialization in the aesthetic sense which is in tune with the act of historiography: decolonialization of Egyptian history the film engages in. In sum, I argue that the importance of studying southern cinemas lies in the very fact that the south offers a unique and diverse cinematic production that spans over a century and still does. This production goes beyond being artistic to being one line of southern knowledge production waiting to be explored and further produced. As we will face a deficiency in the archive in order to locate and revive these cinematic histories, our task as southern scholars might lie in engaging in a southern mode of an archaeology of knowledge which not only shows the gaps, the discontinuities, and the ruptures, but produces an assemblage of entangled lines of knowledge(s), histories, and potentialities. References Abdelsalam, Shady. 1969. The Day of Counting the Years. Egypt: General Egyptian Cinema Organisation. Bickerstaffe, Dylan. 2005. “The Royal Cache Revisited.” The Institute for the Study of Interdisciplinary Sciences, 10: 9–25. Deleuze, Gilles. 1985. Cinema 2 The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlison and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. El Khashab, Walid. 2017. “The Cinema of the Pharaohs: Film, Archaeology, and SubImperialism.” Dialogues artistiques avec les passés de l’Égypte, January 2017. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.inha.7196 Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge Michel Foucault. New York, New York: Pantheon Books. Gamblin, Sandrine. 2015. “Visual Translations of Nationalist Discourse: Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy Revisited.” Lecture at the American University in Cairo, Cairo, November 9. Hammam, Iman. “Al-Momia/The Mummy: Shadi Abdel Salam, 1969.” In The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, edited by Gonul Colin Domez. London: Wallflower, 2007. Johnston, J. Johnston. 2013. “Rewriting History: Shadi Abdel Salam’s ‘The Night of Counting the Years’ (Egypt, 1969).” In A Good Scribe and an Exceedingly Wise Man: Studies in Honour of W.J. Tait, edited by A. Dodson, W.J. Tait, J.J. Johnston, W. Monkhouse, and C.J. Martin, 167–175. London: Golden House Publication. Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Wiley, 2002. Refaey, Karim, Gabriella C. Quinones, William Clifton, Shashwat Tripathi, and Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa. 2019. “The Eye of Horus: The Connection Between Art, Medicine, and Mythology in Ancient Egypt.” Cureus. https://doi.org/10.7759/ cureus.4731 Selim, Kamal. 1939. Al Azima. Misr Studio. Egypt.

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Smethurst, Paul. 2001. The Postmodern Chronotope. Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction. Netherland: Brill | Rodopi. Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. 1970. “Toward a Third Cinema.” Cinéaste, 4(3): 1–10. Accessed October 8, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41685716 van der Spek, Kees. 2011. The Modern Neighbors of Tutankhamun. History, Life, and Work in the Villages of the Theban West Bank. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.

3 CONSTELLATIONS OF TIME Towards a Cartography of Plundered Memories Diego Granja do Amaral

Introduction

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invaded Lebanon, triggering a series of events that culminated with the Sabra and Shatila genocide in September the same year. In Beirut, the IDF raided the Cultural Arts Sections archive. A day earlier Sabri Jiryis, former director of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Research Center, removed its most valuable documents in a hurry before he and other PLO activists escaped from Beirut. Amidst the documents left in the archive was footage that Khadijeh Habashneh, the woman responsible the archives from the Palestinian Cinema Institution (PCI), had spent years trying to gather into one archive. On the opposing side of the battlefront, a Jewish boy took part in the looting. Years later, Rona Sela, an Israeli professor and curator decides to dig into the IDF archives in a quest for Palestinian documents. The outcome of the encounter of the characters mentioned above in Sela´s quest is materialised in the documentary film Looted and Hidden (Israel, 2017) and in the paper “Seized in Beirut: The Plundered Archives of the Palestinian Cinema Institution and Cultural Arts Section”. The documentary is one in a long list of efforts by intellectuals to uncover the malpractices of Israeli entities against Palestinian memory. In this effort, the film casts a light on never-before-seen footage and photographs stolen by the Israeli army, most of which were looted in Beirut during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (Sela, 2017). The return of these images to a broader audience, beyond the IDF’s archives, can be regarded as a form of activism. As Nadia Yaqub observes, the resistance against the erasure of Palestinian archives is “a key component of Palestinian activism” (2018, p. 2). Following the same DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832-3

46  Diego Granja do Amaral

reasoning, the publicisation of the Palestinian documents under control of the IDF is a small, yet important, step in the broader process of decolonisation of the history of the conflict. Moreover, Looted and Hidden consists of a cache of repressed images which were stolen, hidden, manipulated and, notwithstanding, resisted and re-emerged as a documentary film. Looked at in this manner, the film is more than a collection of footage and archival images; it is an eruption. It brings to light memories, objects, and relations buried for a long time by the colonial occupation. In this process, the author also discovers and comments on pieces of her own family history which challenge her position as a distant observer and place her in the position of a character in the documentary. In doing so, she responds to a question posed by Dagmar Brunow: “how are films able to criticise hegemonic historiography without at the same time having to refer to essentialism?” (Brunow 2015, p. 12). In Looted and Hidden, Israeli national history is examined by the professor and visual history researcher Rona Sela, who dedicated a large part of her career to recovering Palestinian archives pilfered by the Israeli state. In the documentary Sela acknowledges her position as a settler and embraces the role of a curator who gathers Palestinian documents and stories. The documents, on the one hand, are mostly recovered from IDF files, whereas the stories come from Palestinian activists with a relevant contribution to the Palestinian liberation movement. The film, then, brings to light an archive concealed from the public. It has the merit of publicising many elements of Palestinian visual history, such as footage from the third wave of Palestinian film, paintings from Ismail Shammout and the rescue work done on the Palestinian Cultural Arts Section. On the other hand, it tells the story of the PLO archives from the perspective of the four emblematic individuals. Curatorship, thus, becomes the operative term for the understanding of this endeavour of criticising historiography without having to rely on essentialisms. The very constitution of the film resembles an archive based on an assemblage of perspectives, documents in different formats (photos and footage) and temporalities. Each of these characters offers a personal account of the events. They speak from a specific place, about their experiences in different historical moments, and are motivated by different reasons. Nevertheless, they are discussing the same archive from Beirut, the same constellations. The perception of the images, thus, varies depending on who is seeing the images, when, and where. These perspectives retrace time, proposing a unique experience of the entangled temporalities of a long-lasting conflict. Composing a common frame out of public (archive) and memories, the film connects different people, in different locations through voices, photos and footages. The film as well as Sela´s research on the archives is an exercise of finding connections between documents and testimonies, affects and real events. As a result, the film consists of a patchwork, a constellation of perceptions.

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A Constellation of Memories

In Walter Benjamin’s essay On the Doctrine of the Similar ([1933]1979), reading is an analogous process to that of looking at the stars, for the reading process requires a mimetic capacity, which leads to the interpretation. To interpret, thus, would be to find similarities. In this sense, reading would be much like looking at a constellation of stars. With that in mind, I shall develop an argument which draws upon Benjamin´s work to encompass the multiplicity of testimonies and actors in Looted and Hidden. Following Benjamin, the gesture of looking at the stars involves at least three elements: the stars/planets, which are continuously moving; the viewer, who also holds a unique position of observation; and another critical element: the moment. For Benjamin, these perceptions are “bound to a time-moment (Zeitmoment)” ([1933]1979: 66). Following the same logic, reading is an inherently creative process in which “the literal text of writing is the sole basis on which the picture puzzle can form itself” ([1933]1979:68). In Looted and Hidden the multiplicity of narrators, their origins, and the very format of the film, divided into six different sections, contribute towards an open interpretation of the Palestinian archives. This, however, happens despite an attempt by the director to guide the viewer throughout the narrative didactically. The film presents three relevant characteristics as a work “from the south”: (1) it presents a counter-hegemonic version of historical facts, in opposition to Israeli official archives, where the visual documents were stored; (2) it connects (patches) scattered memories, gathering documents from different historical moments and testimonies from people willing to provide the Palestinian version of the facts (Khadijeh and Jiryis) or to critically discuss Zionism and its consequences (Sela and the former IDF soldier); and (3) it aims to provide an account of historical events in the absence, or insufficiency, of official sources. Moreover, the film recovers part of a revolutionary filmic archive connected to liberation movements across the Global South. After all, the Palestinian films presented in Looted and Hidden are part of one of the most relevant cinematic heritages in the context of the “Global South”, that is, the militant cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, the Palestinian cinema movement was unique in its condition as a “film movement operating within a national liberation movement of a stateless people” (Yaqub, 2018, p. 1). Considering these criteria, Looted and Hidden appears as a relevant case due to its most critical characteristics: (a) the film itself is an act of rendering public documents that were concealed from the public sphere, especially from Palestinians; (b) in terms of format, the film is, for the most part, composed of footage seized by the Israeli army. These files, however, are not always complete and are dislocated from their original context – a symptomatic aspect that underlines this lacuna in the film is the use of photographs.

48  Diego Granja do Amaral

In most cases, the photos are not used to describe singular moments or scenes. Instead, they function as a way of patching the footage together, adding a sense of legitimacy to the scenes and enhancing the historical value of the sequence. Once again, with regard to the insufficiency of official sources, the documentary is a gesture of compensation. It takes advantage of the filmmaker’s privileged position in an apartheid society, to provide public opinion with some access to files concealed by an authoritarian State. Hence, I would argue that in the composition of Looted and Hidden, the three constitutive components are the visual documents retrieved by Rona Sela from the IDF’s archives, the testimonies which compose each part of the film and, finally, the historic moment when the protagonists made contact with the documents, the “time-moment” (Zeitmoment) of the perception. After all, the documentary would not be viable without the testimonies of the Palestinians, Sabri Jiryis and Khadijeh Habashneh, and their personal experience with the historical documents presented in the film. These testimonies fill the voids in the historical narrative. Each of the characters offers complementary and, yet, very different accounts of the events, providing the spectator with a number of alternative versions and versions on the narration of the conflict and the documents. The audience is also free to interpret the documents independently, since not much detail is provided about each of the works that appear on the screen. The image credits, and the origin of the photos and films, are often only mentioned as an inscription over the files, or not even mentioned at all. In doing so, the film structures the narrative around two axes: the audio, based on the music and testimonies, and the visual documents themselves. The third element to this equation, the spectator, with their background and degree of commitment and information on the conflict is left free to experience the film according to either aspect. The experience of watching Looted and Hidden with the sound muted can be very similar to that of watching a historical exposition on the PalestinianIsraeli conflict, and less than that of watching a documentary film. This approach is encouraged by the film’s montage. After all, the film is divided into six parts, each of them narrated by one of the four key witnesses1 who provide nothing but clues on the history of the archive. In doing so, the film itself composes a board of moving images, and is a moving board in itself. In other words, it becomes an artefact which is interpreted, organised (curated), by an individual who nurtures a personal relationship with the archive.2 Stretching Azoulay´s reading of photography towards a documentary film, this chapter discusses the documentary as an assemblage of voices and documents, an approach that, similarly to Azoulay´s approach, must take into account not only the director, but all those involved in the film, “the, camera, photographers, photographed subject, and spectator” (Azoulay, 2011,p. 21). In our case, it must be understood that the authors (photographers) are Palestinian and Israeli photographers and filmmakers who produced the

Constellations of Time  49

images in the film: Rona Sela, the curator and film director; and those who offered their testimonies, with especial emphasis on Khadijeh Habashneh, archivist from the Palestinian Film Institution. There is, after all, no pure authorship. What Looted and Hidden provokes the spectator to think is a reel of moving and still images, a carousel which turns on the pace of every testimony and according to the perspective of each spectator. Assimilating distinct points of view and pieces of story from the PLO’s archive in Beirut, Sela reinforces her commitment to the task of being a curator. In this capacity, Sela retrieves images of the Palestinian struggle from the Israeli archives and reorganises them with the aid of key actors in the history of the Israeli Palestinian struggle. The anonymous soldier, Jiryis, and Khadijeh are constitutive parts of a narrative attempt to connect personal and collective memories with historical documents. In doing so, the film encompasses a diverse range of discourses such as those embedded in Palestinian resistance propaganda films and Israeli foundational footages. The very movement from the Israeli Archives towards a platform of public access is noteworthy. After all, as Mbembe points out, the status of the archive derives from the “entanglement of building and document” (2002, p. 19). Still according to him, the issue of the archive is a constitutive element of the state. Among the reasons that justify the strategic importance of the archive, the author highlights the state’s “ability to consume time … to abolish the archive and anaesthetise the past”. It is precisely against this gesture that Looted and Hidden operates. The very existence of the film relies on the filmmaker´s commitment not to let the Israeli State consume Palestinian memory. More importantly, the film will question the state repression by posing subjects in contact with the archive. It will, then, perform below a reading of a repressed history. Embracing the multiplicity of messages, the director acknowledges her incapacity to act as “guardian” of those documents. The archonte is also a guardian of the public documents in the archive. She prefers instead the role of a researcher trying to make sense of the empirical material. This strategy works in favour of the spectator who shares with Sela and the other protagonists the position of reader of that emergent fragmented archive. Rona Sela – Undoing the Colonial Archives

Images of a campsite in Israel illuminate the screen. Near the tents children play a circle game. The camera scans, unveiling clothes hanging amidst lines of tents and visuals of debris and sand. The first of six acts start with the formal yet contextually warm greeting “Dear”: firstly, from Rona Sela to “Khadijeh” and subsequently, in the second act, the reverse movement from Khadijeh to “Rona”. The treatment on a first name basis suggests affection and intimacy. Presented as so many

50  Diego Granja do Amaral

personal communications, they express uncertainty in their thoughts and share informal impressions on the documents as if they were friends looking at a family album. Marking the beginning of part I, a dark screen shows the caption: “Rona Sela, Tel Aviv, curator and visual researcher”. Given a name, the perspective displayed on the screen is connected to a person who talks from Tel Aviv. Her professional identity as “curator” is especially important since a curator is someone responsible for creating bridges between heterogeneous elements. It identifies connections, resemblances and tensions in a set of objects which, then, is regarded as worthy in its totality. Evoking Benjamin ([1933] 1979), a curator would be one who finds similarities within the heterogeneity. More than anything, the curatorship is an exercise of the look: a look which should respect the objects within their mode of existence so that these particularities can be brought to enrich the collection. In a different direction, the legislator, who regulates the archive, is a figure of authority. The archonte is someone who conceives the general rules upon which the objects should be collected. It is nevertheless true that, to an extent, to curate is also to establish order. However, the process through which the order is established is different in each case. Originally Latin, the word cura refers to someone who “takes care” of something, as opposed to the archonte, who represents a position of higher authority over the archive (Derrida, 1996)3. Fundamentally, the work of a curator is not only that of collecting and keeping a collection, but rather that of interpreting and sharing its view of certain registers. This equivocal role constitutes a vital difference if compared to the archivist. It also suggests a difference in the way history is approached in each case. The curator, thus, contrasts with the figure of legislator. Whereas the latter represents a masculine and patriarchal entity who establishes pre-determined criteria under which elements should fit, the former points at an affectionate character who brings together and cherishes. These are inherently different lines of operation which cross paths in the archive. The notion of curatorship is herein presented as an alternative form of archive building. In the case of Rona Sela’s work, she does not merely cast light over archives found in Beirut during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Adding footage and photos from other sources to this archive, she composes a new archive. Better yet, Sela takes care of the documents and memories of those willing to share their experiences with the archive from Beirut. None of the footage or photos can be isolated from this personal note. On a broader level, the author’s name and city, where she speaks from, inform the viewer about her perspective. Finally, the professional/academic qualification – visual researcher – offers a hint about the methodology and part of the motivation for the construction of this archive. The film is a constellation as perceived by Sela, even with the aid of others. Navigating through the visual documents, the author acknowledges her position as professor of visual culture, curator, Jewish woman based in Tel Aviv

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and, as she states in the film, daughter of a mother who had to escape from a tragedy. Conscious of the collective dimension of memory, Sela presents a film where historical footage and her memories are deeply intermingled, yet not directly. Sela’s narration seems to be based on an affective response to the images, not a description or logical interpretation. The sense of intimacy, however, does not disguise her estrangement when she encounters parts of her ancestral past that have been kept obscure. Along with that voice, one can only imagine the eyes watching the scenes and sharing them with the spectator. Moving images and the moving eye of the observers track and try to make sense of elements of Palestinian history as Benjamin’s astrologer beholds the stars. Travelling through reminiscences, Sela finds Khadijeh, to whom she will dedicate her first words in the film. As if she were writing a letter, she says: “Dear Khadijeh, we met face to face, only once. But your image accompanies me ever since. Sometimes clear, sometimes elusive. I am writing. The morning of a hot, sultry day. Hotel, a meeting”(01:56–02:25). Addressing Khadijeh, the author suggests that she is not looking at those images alone. At this point, the monologue receives new contours, admitting the dialogical nature of thought. Khadijeh here is nothing but a memory Sela tries to grasp. Yet, she is part of Sela’s gaze as she looks at the Israeli Archives. The dialogical principle can also be applied to the montage of the film. Despite the linear structure suggested by the monologue, the images have their own agenda. Like fragments of a broken nation, the photographs and footage reveal aspects of a non-totalising history. In the impossibility of synthesis, the account of events is accomplished by a set of visual documents from different historical moments before, during and after the Nakba (the 1930s, 1960s, 1980s) intermingled with interviews. It is an interesting choice, considering that the film is a documentary about Palestinian footage and photographs. The act of writing counterposes itself to the images on the screen, which show the ruins of an abandoned building on the seashore and a sunken ship (see Figure 3.1). The ship appears as an allegory for the film’s narrative in its attempt to gather a complex set of memories and archives. From the Palestinian point of view, the ship might represent the diaspora, longing and the impossibility of a return. Seen from the shore, the broken ship might serve as an allegory for a broken nation. In this regard, the choice for this footage depicting the sunken ship is illustrative of a complex relationship which will function as a pillar for the filmic narrative. Not coincidentally, Rona and Khadijeh narrate four out of the six parts of the film. Their position as visual history researcher (Rona) and archivist (Khadijeh) are emblematic of a relationship with memory, film and archive. Immediately following the previous quote, she continues: “you asked why I was in a quest for lost Palestinian archives. I am turning back the wheels of time” (02:33–02:50). Here, the author reinforces the idea of a cartography of

52  Diego Granja do Amaral

FIGURE 3.1 Sunken

ship (02:07).

memory, suggesting that that time can be navigated. Looking at the images she shares with the spectator, she dives into the past. The narration continues with a confession: “National pictures are woven in my life in a surprising manner” (02:56–03:00) (emphasis added). The nation is Israel, and yet Palestine, with its land and people, is there. Ingrained in images of Jewish settlers who work in the recently occupied land, Palestine appears as a phantasmatic presence. Unlike other scenes where it is foregrounded, here Palestine is a striking absence. The images show the hope and hard work of a population who suffered unspeakable forms of violence and finally received a piece of land. According to some accounts of the events, they contain the hope of a mythical return to the promised land after a series of catastrophic events. Furthermore, the passage evidences the relationship between embodied personal memory and national history. Referring to the national pictures, the filmmaker uses the metaphor of life as a fabric to describe the way those images connect with her personal history; the entanglement between collective and personal memories becomes evident. It is possible to visualise how the emergence of images from Palestine, and the foundation of Israel, affects the author personally; uncovering images of the Palestinian uprooting, she discovers clues about her own history and the history of the land. A process of estrangement and self-discovery is registered in the film to which the images serve as non-human witnesses. The voiceover informs us that Aqir was the place where the mother of the film director and her family established themselves, escaping from a “tragedy”. As the voice continues, the camera frames the remains of a house and, positioning the lenses behind a hole in the wall of the house, focusses on two empty beds. Not coincidentally, discussing settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe underlines that “whatever settlers may say – and they generally have a lot

Constellations of Time  53

to say – the primary motive for elimination is not racial (nor religion, ethnicity, etc.) but access to the territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” (2006, p. 388). Furthermore, with Israeli colonialism in mind, he stresses the importance of “renaming” as a central tactical action in the process of erasing an indigenous culture and replacing it with the settlers’ symbolic and concrete presence (Wolfe, 2006). The visual and oral narrations try to make sense of a paradox. The Palestinians were expelled, but their presence insists in occupying a space in the images. Sharing the same frame, past and future, are two sides of the same coin. At this point, many questions may arise. Is the woman wearing a white scarf still alive? Could she ever tell their heirs what happened? Did she have heirs at all? Regardless of these issues, her image is a present body amidst the images of loss (see Figure 3.2). The archive survived the fire, the enemy and oblivion, as the narrator acknowledges when describing The Palestinian village of Aqir, whose inhabitants fled or were expelled. And where my mother´s family were settled. Jewish immigrants on the ruins of the Palestinian entity. The photographs intend to portray the Zionist presence. But that of the Palestinians slips in unintentionally as well. (04:09 – 04:41) Palestine appears in the ruins of houses and in the traces captured by the camera. For instance, in the shots of the settlement even though the newcomers are central to the image, they are always surrounded by debris. The destruction seems to communicate a different temporality – that of the settlers. Such temporality is also evidenced in Israeli architecture, which combines the settlers’ largely European influence with the previously existing

FIGURE 3.2 Old

lady amidst ruins (04:08).

54  Diego Granja do Amaral

Arab traces. As Azoulay explains, this process resulted in “new urban textures” in which the Arab traces mixed with European influence would contribute to a process where “expropriated history will be transformed into a signifier of the past deprived of history” (2011, 151). In other words, this new “Israeli urban fabric” derives from the destruction of Palestinian culture in order to build an Israeli identity. What is particularly relevant for this chapter is the inherently visual nature of such efforts. With this in mind, the debris in question (see Figure 3.3) is emblematic for not simply telling the story of a particular settlement. On the contrary, these images are remarkable for their capacity to illustrate the Israeli colonial project. As Kotef underlines, in the aftermath of the territorial wars in 1948 and 1967, “demolition in its various forms has been dominant political technology in Israel, and an essential element in its construction” (2020, p. 13). Kotef is more than a merely political strategy; the destruction is “woven into Israeli subjectivity, as far as such exists (and national selves never fully exist as such)” (2020, p. 13). Along similar lines, Azoulay claims that “[in Israel] clearing the rubble of demolished Arab homes simply became synonymous with building the land”(2011, 149). Azoulay´s observation is particularly emblematic due to its concern to the visual dimension of such project. Returning to the film, we have Sela narrating her personal history over the images of a house ruined by the occupation. She acknowledges her privilege as part of a settler-colonial state. Memories and images from the village are part of her family history. However, there is a sense of estrangement in her relationship with those pictures. Each scene unfolds the intricate relationship between the land, the archive and the author. It is a confrontation between the collective self, colonial self, as Kotef puts it (2020) and the individual in the pursuit of its own history. As footage displays running water on the

FIGURE 3.3 Debris

of Palestinian architecture (04:42).

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screen, the voiceover shares a confession: “the archive acquires a new dimension in my life”. Further ahead in an excerpt illustrated by the image on the screen, she admits that “[the archive] enters slowly, settles in, meandering and twisting”. The flow of water over a rock, an ancient relation that goes deep, patiently shaping the land, illustrates the voiceover. The archive or, more specifically, this set of images plays the role of the malleable, yet insistent water that shapes the rock despite the different densities (see Figure 3.4). With its movement (“meandering and twisting”) and consistency, the images become part of the author’s self. The figurative language suggests a relationship between the materiality of the land and the fluidity of memory, which flows over the territory and, despite its slow effect, leaves an indelible mark on the territory. Memories travel from the screen to her consciousness and are never still, can never be captured, touched or fully detained. Translucent and malleable, the water becomes part of the terrain it is running over (see Figure 3.4). Water, memories, rocks, feelings and the human body are part of a network that embodies time and through which it flows. As the frame illustrates (see Figure 3.4), the water and the archive act through a slow but consistent movement. Their effects are barely visible but are fundamental in configuring the landscape. In a film based on the curatorship of fugacious images, movement is the glue connecting each piece of this audiovisual archive. In the feverish progression of clips mediated by the author’s personal memories and feelings, the transitions, blinks and lacunae left by the movement of images leave cues, and lines, for the spectator to patch the archive together. The author shares her own experiences of looking and talking about her findings in the Zionist archives. The images, on the other hand, offer a mesmerising glimpse of the transition from the British mandate Palestine to

FIGURE 3.4 Running

water (03:25).

56  Diego Granja do Amaral

the fragmented territory known as Israel and, what came to be the occupied territories of Palestine in the West Bank. In this process, chronological time is blurred in favour of personal accounts of time. Echoing this idea of an intimate sense of temporality, the director does not provide a direct descriptive narration of the images. There are sparse attempts to explain or describe a few of them, but overall, the voiceover presents a reaction to the archive in which she is immersed. After five minutes of the film a voiceover states The uprooting, the tragedy. Before my mother died, I asked her with increasing urgency about her past. I didn’t ask her about Aqir if that reminded her of the tragedy that her family experienced. Was I afraid to confront the answer due to the process of separating from her? (05:20–05:51) As of this point, memories get entangled. The narrator mentions the “tragedy her family experienced”, probably referring to the Holocaust. In this context, however, the Holocaust is not part of a broader justification for the Zionist settlement, but rather a painful memory revived in the Palestinian uprooting. In the testimony, the Palestinian territory synthesises multiple territories and temporalities. It evokes the Jewish diaspora in general, and the Holocaust in particular, the eviction and genocide of Palestinians. It also discusses the present, when these facts are chronologically “behind” the narrator, and yet, they slip in the film evoked by the images or by Sela herself. At this point, it is not easy to distinguish the author and documentary; they are both products of a complex relationship established with the archive. Not coincidentally, subsequent to the previous quote, Sela admits a sense of imprisonment in her relationship with the archive. She says: I am cloistered in the Zionist archive. Looking for Palestinian photographs. Captions capture my eye. The store where these photographs were taken and from where they were pilfered. Imprisoned photographs. Photograph taken from the pocket of a dead Arab. Palestinian archives that were looted or taken as booty. (06:42) The physicality of her involvement is noteworthy. Sela claims to be “cloistered in the Zionist archive”, which suggests that she feels her full body surrounded by the atmosphere of the archive. Symptomatically, on the screen, the image accompanying such sentence is an old footage of women marching (see Figure 3.5). Does Sela recognise herself in that history pervaded by military discipline? Whether it is an image that reflects her self-image or not is beside the point. However, it is interesting to notice the development of a

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FIGURE 3.5 Women’s

FIGURE 3.6 Rissas

march (06:08).

Studio (06:25).

process of self-analysis performed alongside the observation of archive footage – even more so when this archive is an Israeli archive holding Palestinian and early Israeli documents which hold traces of attempts of erasure of an entire culture in order to build a country. Acknowledging the agency of the elements in the archive, she states that the “captions” have captured her eye. Her body seems to be captured by the archive through the eyes. The spectator, then, learns that the image in question was pilfered. Symptomatically of the film´s endeavour, the photograph surpassed its owner, referred to as a “dead Arab” (see Figure 3.6). As a historical document, the photo outlived the photographer as well. In its trajectory, a photograph which belonged once to an anonymous Arab man went to an Israeli archive and from there to online video platforms and film festivals as part of a filmic archive. The photo in question was taken by the Palestinian photographer Chalil Rissas, a pioneer in Palestinian photojournalism.

58  Diego Granja do Amaral

According to Rona Sela, who also wrote on Rissas’s photographic works, the photo had a “hand-written text in Hebrew” with the following inscription: “The store where these pictures were photographed and from where they were ‘pilfered’”. The trajectory of this image and the photos within Rissas’s archive are symptomatic of the Palestinian “presence” that slips into the Zionist archives described by Sela. What might have been once part of a personal collection of memories, an extension of the living memory, a supplement, which becomes now an essential piece of quotidian life in Palestine. The dead Arab from whose pocket the photograph was stolen is also a brutal allegory of the process of plunder, violation and systematic stealth operated against the Palestinian culture. The soldier’s indifference is above all, selective. It is not a simple reflection of the brutality of wartime, but rather a structural indifference against minorities, in this context, Palestinians in particular. As Butler (2004) stresses, the notion that certain bodies are not regarded as worth mourning is a condition for political violence. The brutality of one single individual, thus, is also a symptom of a social issue. This idea resonates in an interview published by the same Rona Sela years before the film launch: The Soldier: “Indeed, I took these photographs from the pocket of a dead Arab, killed in Bab Al-Wad in the beginning of May 1948. I was commander of the squad and we were looking for intelligence.” [1] This is what Moshe Rashkes, a former Jewish soldier and author, told me [Rona Sela]. The photographs – depicting the dead and wounded as well as protests and riots – were donated by Rashkes to the Haganah Archive, a pre-state Israeli military archive. The macabre circumstances – a dead person, who was not photographed, represented unwittingly by other documented bodies – were not even considered by Rashkes. (Sela 2013, online, my emphasis)4 In the excerpt are two interwoven events of consequence for this text: (a) the death of a Palestinian, and the subsequent stealing of his property (b) the Haganah Archive, a military archive within the Israeli Ministry of Defence. The use of the photograph in the archive in question cannot be known, but it seems clear that an object produced in the context of Palestinian culture informed an Israeli archive. Moreover, these documents became important assets for the creation of Israel as a nation, or as Anderson puts it, an imagined community (2006). This photograph is a reminder that the repetition which constitutes the archive is complex. The elements do not reinforce each other but rather deny, add to, challenge, complete, rearticulate. Doing so, they move and produce new meanings according to their contexts and to the set of other images around which they are stored. The images had their agency short-circuited; they are “imprisoned photographs”, according to the narrator.

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These documents thus perform both active and passive roles. They capture the observer despite being imprisoned. They are registers of the Palestinian suffering and struggle, but also pieces of the IDF’s history. The story of this particular photo is emblematic of a larger pattern: the deliberate process of elimination of a culture and its archives. According to Pappé, the process of the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their territories, particularly from 1948 on, contributed to the near eradication of Palestine “from the collective global memory” (2006: 8). Similarly, Sela argues that the ruination of Palestinian villages was part of a broader political project with the intent of erasing them “from public consciousness and memory” (Sela, 2009: 74). The systematic destruction of territory, thus, is the visible layer of a process meant to reach both the physical space and the symbolic realm – in this case, “public consciousness and memory”. Building upon these tensions, the film undertakes the challenge of retelling the history of those registers, which will be reconfigured by the perspective of Khadijeh Habashneh. Khadijeh – Scent of Revolution

In the second part of the film, the spectator is introduced to Khadijeh Habashneh, presented as “Director, Archivist and Cinemateque Founder (1969–1982)”5 of the “Palestinian Cinema Institution, Beirut”. In the form of an exchange of letters, Khadijeh gives her testimony in correspondence with the filmmaker, Rona Sela. The Palestinian archivist, however, is concerned with different issues. She opens her statement with the following question, “Where to start when so much has been destroyed, when the reality is unclear, when a life´s work disintegrates?”. While Sela (Part I) uses the word “exile” to refer to the Jewish diaspora as in “the years of exile cast-off”, for Khadijeh, the exile is described in the present tense. These two uses of the word, however, are not at all contradictory. She talks about “exile, trauma and resistance …” as a triad. Images of displaced families marching towards exile, armed resistance and pain endorse that idea (see Figure 3.7). In this context, the Nakba appears as an ongoing process of oppression, instead of one great tragedy/exodus in 1948. Following the notion of resistance in the voiceover and images comes another crucial term: rebellion. Different from part I, Khadijeh’s testimony focuses on notions such as revolution and resistance. If the mention of “exile” connects the first and second parts of the film, here, tragedy, displacement and violence appear as supplements to the idea of rebellion. Despite it being an individual and personal account of the events involving the construction of a visual archive of Palestinian memories and the Palestinian revolution, her testimony also serves as the discourse of a collective: the Palestinian revolutionaries.

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FIGURE 3.7 Displaced

Palestinians (15:19).

The Palestinian Film Institute (PFI) was founded amidst the turmoil of 1968. As a product of its time, the institute was created to disseminate the revolution through cinema (Habashneh, 2008). In her article on the history of Palestinian cinema, Khadijeh stresses the importance of the creation of Palestinian cinema institutions to express the importance of the medium to express the Palestinian struggle as well as to raise international recognition for the cause (Habashneh, 2008). Towards this end, the PFI contributed to organising Palestinian visual memory around the notion of “revolution”. Moreover, the images in films created by this group and those influenced by them constitute an imaginary of the conflict from the Palestinian point of view. The importance of these efforts, thus, is twofold: they shape and offer structure to a fragmented cause, and, thereby, they organise the experience of the present. In Khadijeh’s testimony, it becomes clear that by registering and articulating facts and political ideas, the PFI performed an instrumental role in the constitution of the space of experience in Palestine. In other words, by shaping the notion of revolution through the medium of films, the group instituted the use of emblematic terms such as “struggle”, “revolution”, “exile”, “fight” in the context of the Palestinian resistance. This effort helped articulate a narrative around the traumatic events, providing tools for the debate around the Palestinian cause. The vocabulary adopted by Khadijeh is not accidental. She was part of the third wave of the Palestinian “cinema movement”, a movement that took place around 1968 and was developed outside of the Palestinian territory. The third wave replaced the iconic image of the Palestinian in “exile” by the freedom fighter, in a turning point of Palestinian visual production. This was the point when the iconography of the Palestinians acquired the figure of the resistance fighter (Sela, 2017).

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The Third Cinema Movement focused not on aesthetics but, rather, “contribution for the revolution” (Sela, 2017). Such focus can be illustrated by film titles such as Zionist Aggression (ʿUdwan sihyuni, 1972) and They Do Not Exist (Laysa lahum wujud, 1974) directed by Mustafa Abu Ali; and Away from Home (1969) by Qais al-Zubaidi. These films address key elements of the Palestinian national struggle which cannot be dissociated from Israeli violence. Furthermore, the third cinema movement, of which Khadijeh is a representative character, is emblematic of a worldwide struggle for decolonisation. In this regard, the first relevant characteristic of Palestinian cinema from that period is its inherently political nature. It was inspired by political cinema movements around that period (1960s and 1970s) and the Third Cinema movement (Solanas and Getino, 1970). As Nadia Yaqub explains, “Palestinian cinema is also significant because its rise coincided with the development of an alternative cinema movement in the Arab world” (Yaqub 2018, p. 2). It is also relevant to observe that the so called Palestinian cinema, due to the notorious circumstances of the conflict, was developed throughout the Arab world. For instance, the Palestinian Cinema institution was based in Lebanon in the occasion of the Israeli raid mentioned in Looted and Hidden. The filmmaker Kais Al-Zubaidi, who also has some of his footage cited and screened in Looted and Hidden, comes from Iraq. Sela emphasises that the Palestinian cinema movement was “born as militant, subversive cinema, and as part of the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist revolution in the Third World” (Sela 2017, p. 92). Once again, aesthetics and politics merge (See Figure 3.8). The Third Cinema Movement contributed decisively to the way of seeing the Palestinians, which lasts until this day. Hence, it is also fair to say that Southern aesthetics, and particularly the aesthetics from the liberation movements from places such as Cuba and

FIGURE 3.8 Palestinian

resistance (00:15:44).

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Algeria, where cinema developed after their liberation struggles, was highly influential not only in Palestinian cinema, but in the process of forging a Palestinian national identity. It is also relevant to point out that the Third Cinema movement is a turning point in the history of Palestinian cinema. Since this period, despite all odds, Palestinian cinematography became relevant on a global scale. Among the images of “rebellion”, machine guns are almost omnipresent. Not surprisingly, the logo of the Palestinian cinema institution founded by Khadijeh has both the olive branch and a machine gun in its iconography. It is also emblematic that Khadijeh describes the Palestinian Cinema Institution as the first Palestinian visual archive. The first effort to organise the visual memory of the nation incorporates a weapon, symbolising resistance; film reels, referencing the very nature of the archive; and the olive leaf, the ultimate symbol of the Palestinians’ relationship with the land. Although these images might be regarded as clichés, their relevance comes from the fact that they are the inception of Palestinian identity as it is known by the world nowadays. It is not possible to dissociate institutions such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Cinema Institution in the same way that it would be difficult to separate the identities of filmmakers from that period from that of resistance fighters. Thus, these images represent the birth of something more than just a highly political and decolonial cinema; they represent part of one of the most radical efforts ever made towards a decolonial aesthetics: the creation of a national identity for a stateless people (see Figure 3.9). Remembering the Palestinian Cinema Institution, Khadijeh declares: “They combine film with still photography and I can still see those young people, pioneers, bold, motivated and imbued with ideals … revolutionaries” (13:33–13:51). Reminiscing on her days in the Palestinian Cinema Institution,

FIGURE 3.9 Palestinian

Cinema institution logo (00:16:48).

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Khadijeh describes the effort to create a revolutionary Palestinian identity through film and photographs. Cinema informs the struggle and is informed by it. Interestingly, the piece also serves as a description of Looted and Hidden as a filmic exercise. Combining still photographs and films, the documentary is an attempt to reconstruct part of Palestinian visual memory. Since memory cannot be reconstructed as a pure object, the film offers a contemporary glimpse of a revolutionary past along with the struggle of the settlers themselves. In this regard, it is not simply a return of seemingly lost archives, it is a reincorporation of the past within the spectrum of the present, represented by the filmmakers’ troubled relationship with the territory. Closing her testimony in Part V, Khadijeh shares a memory that forefronts a sharp image of the Palestinian resistance: “we were forced to leave Beirut with a personal bag and a firearm in our hands” (34:21–34:25). Most of the films from the Beirut archive were lost and could not be recovered, until that point, except for films sent for development abroad. For that reason, “the issue of the archive remains an enigma” (35:10–35:13) claims Khadijeh: a bag, a firearm and many hours of footage left behind. In a few words, the Palestinian revolutionary who spent a lifetime producing and gathering Palestinian films synthesises a struggle that extrapolates her own life. It is the struggle of many people who built the history of the Palestinian struggle and are still forced to spend their lives resisting and fighting against oblivion. Killing in the Name: The Anonymous Soldier

The third part of the film is narrated by a former Israeli Defence Forces soldier. He speaks from the capital city and, more than the other testimonies, in his case, what is important is his capacity to represent a larger group. Unlike any other character interviewed in the documentary, the soldier is not individuated as a person. The caption describing him mentions only his former occupation and city. There is no name, nor hints about his qualifications. If Sela speaks as the curator, the person who went on a “quest for lost Palestinian archives”, and Khadijeh is one of the founders of a relevant archive, the soldier was merely a tool in the occupation. He is a nameless and faceless character, who speaks anonymously on behalf of those who served the Israeli state. Picking up the thread from Khadijeh’s testimony, which he presumably did not hear by the time he was interviewed for the film, the former soldier also talks about tragedy and trauma. Reading the testimony, a hesitant male voice admits that he saw this photograph on your desktop. Years ago. I paused. Gazed at the image, froze. I told you I know this building. The photo reminded me of things I would prefer to forget. You [Rona Sela] also turned pale. Didn’t speak.

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Such a reaction suggests that the film encompasses more than just the photo as a historical document. The new archive constituted in the footage embraces the emotions of the soldier, who was part of the group depicted in the image (see Figure 3.10). Like many other scenes, this one denotes the inherently personal dimension of any archive. Reacting to the images, the soldier illustrates the fact that the archive is never exclusively “external” to the individual: the Self. Historical documents, political life, and affect cannot be separated. The tragedy, the uprooting, the catastrophe, are all connected to individuals and institutions. Even for those who did not take part in it directly, such as Sela, the archive has a powerful affective appeal, for it speaks to cultural memory. It is a register of time, and in this specific case of Palestine, a time that refuses to move on, or again, moves towards a darker future exempt of any hope. The photo in question is that of the Cultural Arts Section building occupied by Israeli soldiers during the invasion of Beirut. Ruined by the Israeli attacks, the building´s windows display bullet holes, and a torn sign of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The ruins of the PLO, occupied by young Israeli soldiers, are also the physical frame for a collective trauma. In the testimony, two interesting elements around the photo appear – first, the trauma from the perpetrators’ side. A soldier who was part of a terrible massacre admits to having trouble even looking at the image. Second, it manifests the vitality of the archive as a tool pushing for remembrance, rather than merely the simple preservation of a past which can then be forgotten, given its preservation in an external apparatus. The anonymity of the testimony is also significant. It suggests the shame, and perhaps trauma, of

FIGURE 3.10 Cultural

Credit: Shlomo Arad

Arts Section (CAS) building in Beirut.

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participation in the catastrophic events promoted by the Israeli Army. From a narrative point of view, this approach reinforces the soldier´s position as a representative of the army. The soldier does not speak in his own name. Perhaps not even for the army. He is one of many young boys “of 18 or 19” in the PLO building (See Figure 3.10). The image above resonates with an idea developed throughout the entire film: the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, institutions and the appropriation of its memories. In this case, the PLO building, marked by a sign with Arabic and English texts, contrasts with the relaxed presence of young soldiers and a writing in Hebrew, on the right side of the frame (Figure 3.10). Like many others, the young soldier was merely a tool to perform the larger task of erasing Palestinian history. The raid on the PLO building, thus, was not simply part of a military move to neutralise an enemy in the armed struggle. As Sela explains, Israel conceals Palestinian treasures not only by physical means (seizing of booty or looting) but also by a strict system of management, control and “knowledge production” – laws, rules, norms, methods and archive procedures such as censorship, restricted study, access prohibition/limitation, control over what is declassified (to whom and to what extent), cataloging and labeling according to Zionist codes and terminology that differ from the original Palestinian terminology, signifying Israeli ownership over the material and more. (2016: 202, my emphasis) This process illustrates how the Israeli state establishes an apparatus based on “laws, rules, norms” but also on “methods and archive procedures” to control the discourse about the Zionist and Palestinian presence in the territory. This is a symptom of the intent to change the “codes and terminology” when they are incompatible with the Zionist version. These modifications in the vocabulary, thus, are crucial for understanding the importance of the symbolic realm of the struggle. Beyond the shift in vocabulary, the change in the way documents are catalogued and coded implies a revision of history to justify the Zionist presence in Palestine. Bearing this in mind, an effort to liberate these archives and to cast a light on the Palestinian archives requires a fresh look at the images produced by the conflict, as much as their expressive meaning. In the third part of the film, following Khadijeh´s perspective on the archive from Beirut, and the images selected by Sela, it is possible to identify the emergence of a symbolic pattern, which is both verbal and visual. In the visual dimension, the second part is the first moment when the already notorious image of the anonymous Palestinian protester appears. Wearing an improvised mask, the protester arches his body to throw a rock.

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In the context of the documentary, the image is part of a sequence from the film Anti-Siege (1977) by Iraqi filmmaker Kais Al-Zubaidi.6 Al-Zubaidi claims that the work was developed in cooperation with the Cultural Arts Section and the Democratic Front. Therefore, in the making of this sequence or, more specifically, of these three images above (Figure 3.11), there is the involvement of several hands and the presence of many layers of time. The scenes from Anti-Siege come to be reincorporated forty years later in an Israeli film on the Palestinian struggle. It is also relevant to notice that the film was created from still photographs and clips, which not only approximates it to Looted and Hidden, but also suggests the experience of looking at a moving archive. The recording of the movement, the collective production of the filmic material, and the use of parts of the original footage in Looted and Hidden – all these steps implied a connection between different perspectives and temporalities. Each of the filmmakers presents their account of the events in Palestine yet, in common, they report a choreography of resistance that pervades time. The movement performed by the man in the sequence above evokes a long line of uprisings. A masked civilian who arches his body to throw a rock against the military or the police is a gesture repeated in multiple insurrections and characteristic of rebellions (Didi-Huberman, 2016). The images of rebel bodies, precarious soldiers and strong women appear along with others such as smoke, fire, debris and barbed wire in an iconology of the conflict from the Palestinian perspective (See Figure 3.12). In Looted and Hidden it comes with terms such as “destruction” and “atrocities” mentioned by Khadijeh and by the anonymous soldier. Along with ideas such as uprooting, destruction is a thread connecting the images in this visual archive. Throughout the entire documentary, scenes of destroyed houses, trashed buildings and neighbourhoods on fire set the tone for the film. Overall, they suggest a temporality tainted by traces of violence, conflict and resistance.

FIGURE 3.11 Palestinian

protester (21:29–21:30).

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FIGURE 3.12 Explosion

in Beirut, Lebanon (19:14).

The Uprooting: Sabri Jiryis

Anchored in the figure of Sabri Jiryis, a Palestinian lawyer and activist engaged in the Palestinian liberation movements, the fourth cut switches perspectives again. In his testimony, Jiryis recollects memories of the Nakba. For him, instead of a simple mass of migrants, the great Palestinian tragedy is encapsulated in a few scenes: “I saw the convoys of Palestinian refugees who were expelled – the refugees of Tarshiha. They passed through our village. I remember my grandmother giving them thick slices of bread with labane.7 Bread straight from the oven. It’s an image I will never forget. It accompanies me all my life” (See Figure 3.13). In this short excerpt, it becomes clear how a set of events, and its images, cannot be circumscribed to a specific set of dates. The fragment suggests that time can be extended, especially in the form of an image, or a set of images. The images which accompanied Jiryis during his entire life mobilised multiple affects that are not exclusive to him. Consternation about the idea of a massive wave of displaced individuals who lost their homes overnight, as much as love for the figure of a grandmother distributing bread in a moment of crisis, are emotions ingrained in the images triggered by the report. Carrying with him the picture of a grandmother giving refugees bread and cheese, Jiryis grew up to become a lawyer and activist. Years later, after issuing claims for the “return of Palestinian assets” and “publishing books and articles that Israel viewed as hostile” he was banished to Lebanon. In Beirut, he became the director of the PLO Research Centre, responsible for the archive which lies in the core of the documentaries debate. In his position of director of the centre, Jiryis makes an enlightening observation. He claims to have rescued the materials he regarded as the most important the night before

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FIGURE 3.13 Convoy

of Palestinian refugees (23:04).

the IDF’s arrival. Those materials, he says, were “the real archive, not what the IDF took”. In the context of the film, Jiryis’s statement acquires an especial relevance for it adds a perspective on the broader issue of Palestinian history. Not all is lost, and in this case, the most valuable parts continued to remain under the control of the Palestinian leadership. Jiryis’s statement illustrates the importance of multiple narrators. If Sela stresses the value of her findings, Jiryis counterbalances this perspective by informing the viewer that the most important parts were not lost and therefore that the enemy did not possess the PLO’s most valuable documents. As a whole, the documentary is built upon versions that neither contradict nor complement one another. Instead, the relationship between the testimonies adds an oral layer to the digital archive of the film, which in its turn cannot be stabilised but rather left open as a dynamic structure. Conclusion

Through Looted and Hidden, past and present appear intermingled in the fabric of the filmic structure. As a virtual archive, the film brings together Rona Sela’s memories, Zionist national footage suggesting the proud (re) foundation of a nation, and the brutal expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land. As a patchwork, the filmic body connects threads from the past to overcome gaps left by the violence and forced dispossession. It is, thus, a collective gesture of remembrance, which is simultaneously aided by and constitutes a new archive. The film is narrated from the perspectives of a Jewish woman (Sela), an Arab filmmaker and archivist responsible for the foundation of the Palestinian film institution (Khadijeh), an Arab intellectual and activist (Jiryis) and a former Israeli soldier. These four points of view tackle a similar set of events and, fundamentally, at the same archive.

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Their memories cross paths in Beirut, more specifically at archives looted during the invasion of Lebanon. Evoking the notion of similarity and the constellation as a framework, one might identify how these images connect each of these individuals. More importantly, these testimonies help to rearticulate documents pilfered and hidden by the Israeli State. It is nevertheless true that Rona Sela is the person responsible for bringing those images and testimonies together. Moreover, Sela directed the film, making relevant decisions with an impact on what and how the images would be seen. Despite this, I shall insist that the filmic work does not belong to Sela, as a constellation does not belong to the observer. As Ariella Azoulay argues, the civil contract of photography “takes into account all the participants in photographic acts – camera, photographer, photographed subject, and spectator – approaching the photograph (and its meaning) as an unintentional effect of the encounter between all of these” (2008, p. 21). Each of them is looking at the archive (constellation) and the images (stars) in its own way. As each person holds its unique perspective linked to its position and moment (Benjamin’s Zeitmoment), the narration captures the ensemble of views to constitute a narrative. As a patchwork of images, this film is a political act through an aesthetic gesture. The act is the devolution of historical documents to the public sphere, whereas the aesthetic gesture suggests that these images compose an archive that cannot be detained. More than an archive in the sense of a space of storage, the film is a travelling recollection of memories, embodied in the interviewed characters and in the historical documents. In the process of publicising archives, the figure of the archontic is replaced by that of curator and filmmaker. Embracing these roles, Sela curates of a set of images that brings her personal experience in that land to the account of the facts. In doing so, she also becomes part of the “archive” disrupting the aseptic distance between the professional archivist and the objects and documents of memory. Moreover, the film presents these tensions by juxtaposing images that have in common the fact that they were shot in the same territory, and in most cases are denied to the public eye. If in Derrida’s account of archive fever, the archive appears as a supplement of memory, the role of the documentary as source of memory is related to a healing process connected to the gathering of a diasporic memory (Derrida, 1996). The very fact that the images had to be extracted from the original archives where they were being kept from circulation and then reach the public reinforces the idea of the non-supplementary of these images. In Looted and Hidden, the archive images appear as the return of suppressed memories withheld from the collective consciousness and presented in a storm of images, footages and narration. A couple of symptoms of this absence in Looted and Hidden illustrate the relationship between dispossession and remembrance. First, the film is narrated through the perspective of four characters whose memories complement the

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documents found by Sela. Each of them, including the filmmaker, bears scars from losses and a relationship with conflict. They present rich yet incomplete accounts of the events and equally intriguing insights about the images. Second, the images were mostly recovered from the archives looted in Lebanon and were not accessible to the public. Even Sela, who had access to some of the IDF archives, cannot determine the extension of the archive and what the Palestinian films are in there (Sela, 2017). This sense of incompleteness seems to pervade the film and work in its favour. The documentary, thus, is an audiovisual carousel of ruins and fire, of resistance, exile and deaths; elements that are displayed in a frenzied series of snapshots and short footage. Sela suggests that time may be moving backwards, and the visual narrative takes the spectator back and forward through a version of the history. Unlike the astrologer who looks at the stars to predict an individual´s destiny, Sela orchestrates pieces of history in the form of deposals and visual documents to compose a visual cartography of the Palestinian struggle. The attempt to recollect and approximate historical pictures and footages creates a space where multiple temporalities negotiate. Admitting the inherently incomplete nature of the efforts, Rona Sela, now acting in the capacity of a last witness, ends her participation admitting that she has been thinking about the words left unsaid between her, Khadijeh and Tamam.8 These words, spoken or not, “are left up in the air”. Perhaps that is the mission of a visual archive, to keep words and images alive, up in the air so that those who come might rearrange them as a wanderer who moves with the stars. Notes 1 Khadijeh Habashneh narrates parts II and V, whereas Rona Sela narrates parts I and VI. 2 Here, the term archive is applied to describe a set of images in the film, and the archive looted in Beirut, which is the primary source of the film. 3 The contrast between the curator and the archonte pointed out in this text is a reference to Derrida´s reading of the Archive in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996). 4 Available at: https://www.ibraaz.org/platforms/6/responses/141/#_ftn1 5 Symptomatically, the cinematheque founded by Khadijeh, along with other Palestinian activists, was created the year after the Six Day War and closed due to the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. 6 In correspondence with Rona Sela. Sela recovered the film from the IDF archives (see Sela, 2017) 7 Labane is a sour white cheese popular in the Middle East. 8 A reference to Tamam Al-Akhal, Palestinian painter interviewed for the film.

References Anderson, B., 2006. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso Books. Azoulay, A., 2008. The civil contract of photography. New York, NY: Zone Books.

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———, 2011. From Palestine to Israel: A photographic record of destruction & state formation, 1947–1950. Mosaic, 4, 25. Benjamin, W., & Tarnowski, K., 1979. Doctrine of the similar (1933). New German Critique, 17, 65–69. Brunow, D., 2015. Remediating transcultural memory: Documentary filmmaking as archival intervention (Vol. 23). Berlin, Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. Butler, J., 2004. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London/New York: Verso Books. Derrida, J., 1996. Archive fever: A Freudian impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Didi-Huberman, G., 2016. Uprisings. Paris: Gallimard; Jeau de Paume. Habashneh, K., 2008. Palestinian revolution cinema. This Week in Palestine, n. 117, January. Kotef, H., 2020. The colonizing self: Or, home and homelessness in Israel/Palestine. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mbembe, A., 2002. The Power of the Archive and its Limits. In Refiguring the archive (pp. 19–27). Dordrecht: Springer. Pappé, I., 2006. The 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Journal of Palestine Studies, 36(1), 6–20. Sela, R., 2009. Presence and absence in ‘abandoned’ Palestinian villages. History of Photography, 33(1), 71–79, DOI: 10.1080/03087290802582970 ———, 2013. The archive of horror. IBRAAZ, Platform 006. ———, 2016. Palestinian archives in Israel: A history of silencing. [Online]. [Accessed 4 March 2019]. Available from: http://www.ronasela.com/en/details.asp?listid=83 ———, 2017. Seized in Beirut: The plundered archives of the palestinian cinema institution and cultural arts section. Anthropology of the Middle East, 12(1), 83–114. Solanas, F. and Getino, O., 1970. Toward a third cinema. Cinéaste, 4(3), 1–10. Wolfe, P., 2006. Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. DOI: 10.1080/14623520601056240 Yaqub, N., 2018. Palestinian cinema in the days of revolution. University of Texas Press.

4 SINGING IN SAFFRON TIMES* Documentary Film and Resistance to Majoritarian Politics in India† Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar

India has witnessed an upsurge of Hindu supremacist politics since the late 1980s, leading to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement1 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid, in 1992, in Ayodhya, purported to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. This has also culminated in the political rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has held power (in the central government and several of the state governments) since 2014, with a brute majority. The rise of Hindutva2 has far-reaching consequences for polity and civil society in the country. Several documentary filmmakers have chosen to interrogate this hegemonic politics of hate against religious minorities and marginal caste groups in India.3 This ‘singing’ of counter-narratives continues to resonate in the Indian public sphere, despite growing regimes of censorship and control. A brief discussion on censorship will set the context within which documentary production and distribution are located. In India, film (including documentary film) is subject to pre-censorship governed by the Cinematograph Act of 1952, and the revised Cinematograph Bill of 2019. Needless to say, the notion of censorship itself has become infructuous, given the dramatic changes in the production, circulation and consumption of media. However, debates *  With due apologies to Bertolt Brecht for this allusion to his lines: “In the dark times |Will there also be singing?” (Brecht, 1987, p. 320). Saffron the dominant colour palette used by the Sangh Parivar (literally ‘family of organisations’) of which the ‘non-political’ Rashritya Seva Sangh (RSS) is the apex organisation. National Democratic Alliance is a coalition of Rightwing parties, under the aegis of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); BJP is political face of the Sangh Parivar. The colour saffron in modern India has hence, come to represent their majoritarian politics, Hindutva (literally Hindu-ness). † The authors gratefully acknowledge the valuable suggestions made by Lalit Vachani, Prateek Shekhar, Anne Rutherford, Faiz Ullah, Kalyani Monteiro Jayasankar, Dilip Menon and Amir Taha. DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832-4

Singing in Saffron Times  73

around the issue of censorship in the public imagination tend to privilege centralised control, based on the simplistic assumption of the “image as harm” (Ghosh 2004). On behalf of the state, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) acts as a prophylactic filter to protect ‘less powerful others’, seen as lacking in judgment and self-control. This overlooks the fact that cinematic texts are complex, allowing for many different interpretational possibilities (Jayasankar and Monteiro, 2016). Censorship denies this, assuming that every structure has a singular meaning, which can be arbitrated by the censor. Regimes of control of moving images in India come in many hues: the state, markets and finally vigilante censorship. All theatrical releases and public screenings of feature films (and documentary films) have to obtain a certification from the Central Board of Film Certification.Even if many documentary films get past this first obstacle, the avenues for commercially viable distribution are limited, as few television channels show documentaries in India. Lastly, there are instances of films, including feature narratives, that have faced disruptions because of ‘hurt sentiments’.4 The community of documentary filmmakers in India has consistently opposed censorship since the early 2000s, campaigning against acts of state censorship (for instance at film festivals) and organising alternative forums for screenings of documentaries, which continue to be active all over the country. Given the repressive regimes of control, and the difficulty of theatrical release, many independent documentary filmmakers just bypass the censorship mechanism and screen their work in alternative forums and in film festivals (Jayasankar and Monteiro, 2016, Battaglia, 2018, Kishore, 2020). These are the broad contours within which this chapter seeks to explore the terrain of documentaries that address the politics of hate and intolerance in India, discussing in detail two exceptional films, The Boy in the Branch (Vachani, 1993) and Chai Darbari (Shekhar, 2019) – with a view to putting forward some very tentative propositions regarding Southern aesthetic(s). These concern the themes of certainty of meaning structures, climactic closures, and relationships and reflexive negotiations between the authors, audiences and cinematic texts. At the outset, we would like to express our discomfort with the notion of a Southern aesthetic or even an Indian aesthetic, which is fraught with the potential risk of essentialism and exclusion. Rather, we would regard the multiplicity of films that emanate from diverse locations of resistance, as a complex and contradictory force field, where perhaps one could distinguish certain patterns of engagement and modes of address. We argue that these and other contemporary documentary films move away from the imagination of the political documentary as primarily evidentiary, univocal and instrumental. We explore the possible ways in which we could understand Southern aesthetics in this context. The context of our exploration is India and at this point we feel unable to generalise our propositions beyond our specific context, lest we lose track of its granularity.

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Documentary and the Politics of Hate

Many documentary films have used traumatic events (like ethnic violence, pogroms and political killings) and their aftermath as a starting point in their critical engagement with majoritarian politics. Deepa Dhanraj’s Kya Hua Iss Shaher Ko (What Happened to This City? 1986) is one of the earliest independent documentaries to represent the voices of the survivors of communal violence and the dynamics of identity-based mobilisation in Hyderabad, after the violence of 1984.5 Anand Patwardhan’s work documents the rise of Hindutva, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in films like Ram Ke Naam (In the Name of God, 1991). This film follows L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra, a nationwide movement by the Sangh Parivar,6 towards the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the construction of a Ram temple. Patwardhan continues his documentation of the political underbelly of the Hindutva project in films like Father, Son and Holy War (1995), War and Peace (2002) and Reason (2019), outlining the surge of exclusionary politics and its relationship to hyper-nationalism, religious identities and toxic masculinities. These films, unlike the first one, are marked by the inclusion of a reflexive narration; Patwardhan infuses them with the personal and thereby accords a space for social location of the filmmaker. Rakesh Sharma’s Final Solution (2003) is a powerful document of state complicity in the violence after a purportedly staged setting on fire of a train in Godhra, Gujarat.7 A group of 59 Hindu pilgrims were killed, and this was projected as having been perpetrated by the local Muslim community, triggering violence against Muslims in Gujarat. The film brings out the premeditated nature of the violence, thus questioning the oft-held opinion that it was a spontaneous ‘riot’. The second part documents the aftermath of the event culminating in the re-election of Narendra Modi. Though the film was banned for several months initially, on grounds of ostensibly promoting ethnic violence, it ultimately received a censor certificate after prolonged protests and campaigns. Muzaffarnagar Baki Hai (Muzaffarnagar Eventually, 2015) by Nakul Singh Sawhney is set in Muzaffarnagar and adjoining districts of Uttar Pradesh which witnessed communal violence against Muslims, in September 2013, engineered by the communal forces to gain political control over Western U.P. Right-wing organisations, in many parts of India, have protested against the screening of the film, claiming that it is a distortion of facts. The documentary presents testimonies of families of both Hindu and Muslim communities who were affected by the horrific violence. Apart from these films that foreground the violence against the most significant religious minority in terms of demography – Muslims – there were also some films that deal with the politics of hate against Sikhs, Christians and Dalits. For instance, Voices from the Ruins: Kandhamal in Search of

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Justice (2016) by K.P. Sasi, critically documents the violence against the Adivasi and Dalit Christians in 2008 in Kandhamal, Orissa. The survivors of the Kandhamal violence are yet to obtain compensation, rehabilitation and justice. 1984, When the Sun Didn’t Rise (2017) by Teenaa Kaul Pasricha revisits the anti-Sikh pogrom following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, in 1984, by her Sikh security detail. The film chronicles the lives of the widows of those killed in the aftermath. While these and several other films are significant contributions8 to the discourse against the politics of hate and bigotry, we have chosen to work, in this chapter, with a somewhat marginal strand in the documentaries against Hindu supremacist politics. We foreground two documentary texts that aspire to involve audiences in looking at the fabric of everyday, normal spaces, or in looking at the ‘normality’ of fraught spaces. In this chapter, therefore, we will examine the two films mentioned earlier – The Boy in the Branch (Vachani, 1993) and Chai Darbari (Shekhar, 2019) – locating them in the context of the body of documentary work that deals with the politics of intolerance. We try to understand how these two films break new ground, and how this helps us broaden our understanding of the nature of political documentary texts in the Indian context. As discussed elsewhere (Jayasankar and Monteiro, 2016), the register for the political documentary has tended to be rather two-dimensional. The documentary tended to be seen as an epistephilic text that was purposive, where aesthetic and affective considerations were secondary (with a few exceptions). A dominant notion of the documentary filmmaker is that of a sender of messages aimed at changing the behaviour and perceptions of audiences. Both the aspirations of political filmmakers and the expectations of audiences added up to focusing on this imagined effect on a mythical audience elsewhere. Many such films lacked a reflexive interrogation of the location of the filmmakers and their subject positions, choosing to locate themselves outside the flows of power and resistance that they were attempting to represent. Anand Patwardhan’s significant body of work strategically steers clear of formal stylistic devices, at least in the early years of his career, and has tended to set the standards for what an independent political documentary in India should aspire to be. This has, at times, led to a vacuous and theoretically unsustainable debate around ‘form’ and ‘content’ as well as an imagined distinction between ‘political’ and ‘aesthetic’ films (Jayasankar and Monteiro, 2016, p. 21). Our experience of living through the turbulent Mumbai violence of 1992 and 1993 pushed us to explore how we could handle the themes of identity, secularism, intolerance and co-existence in times where politics was increasingly polarised on religious lines. How can we cinematically speak of the politics of hate or resistance to this hate in ways that avoid simplistic polarities and make space for a thoughtful engagement with issues of identity and difference? We have tried to work with this theme, using a range of narrative

76  Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar

strategies, from experimental work with found objects (Identity: The Construction of Selfhood, 1994) to more narrative style films that look at peace initiatives (Naata: The Bond, 2003) and little traditions of living with difference (The Kachchh Trilogy: Do Din ka Mela 2009, So Heddan So Hoddan, 2011 and A Delicate Weave, 2017), to working with students to create an online multi-media memorial to the 1992–93 violence in Mumbai (Monteiro and Jayasankar, 2016). In all this work, the attempt has been to critically look at the safe secular space from which we speak and to understand that the politics of hate is not just about unfortunate events happening out there but is also a process in which all of us are implicated. The Invisible Games of Hate: The Boy in the Branch

The innocent face of the boy, Kali, who opens the film The Boy in the Branch (Vachani, 1993), is deceptive, belying the rabbit hole that awaits the viewers. Vachani:  Why do you go to the Branch? Kali: Because it’s fun. They teach you manners and to play games. And they teach you to respect your parents. A number of other boys, some as young as six, echo this refrain: love for games, respect for parents and elders, obedience. All these young boys have been inducted into the shakha or branch; the local, neighbourhood space where boys meet, exercise and play every day, and from which the Hindu supremacist organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), derives its volunteers. As Mohan Bhagwat (then the Chief of Physical Education, currently heading the organisation) avers, “The Branch is the Life of the RSS.” The film, an unflinching observation of an RSS branch in the city of Nagpur, pulls the viewer into the seemingly innocuous vortex of a shadowy organisation that has been banned thrice in independent India. Vachani’s access to this organisation was obtained based on his proposal that he would stick to RSS sources for his film, which the RSS believed would give their ideology a wider exposure, as the documentary was being produced by Channel 4 TV in the UK: This was my main creative and also political challenge: I would go into RSS territory, use its sources and make a film that documented the activities of its most important institution, the shakha. But the film would also stand alone as an anti-RSS text. The idea that we had was to juxtapose text and image – use the RSS’ own words in inter-titles to tell a story – like the viciously communal diatribes of their chief ideologue Golwalkar – and to let the RSS narrate its own critique, as it were. (Vachani, in Khanna, 2019, p.174)

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At the core of the branch is the idea of discipline (see Figure 4.1). The branch is a closely watched ring, where every action is carefully monitored; any deviance is dealt with swiftly: eating peanuts, talking, and inattention are all seen as infringements inviting punitive action. The film closely observes how the micro-techniques of power unfold in the branch and how this connects to the larger project of the RSS, which is to create a Hindu nation. It shows how in and through “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 1982), such as exercise, games and other ritual practices, young Hindutva subjectivities are produced and maintained. The circle is the fulcrum of the group; a recurring image in the film is a series of fast tight pans of the boys running around the circle, screaming out exhortations such as “Victory to Mother India.” The viewer begins to feel hemmed in: the vertigo and the claustrophobia are palpably haptic throughout the film. Lalit, the instructor, is at the centre of this circle. Like a human panopticon, he ensures control and discipline. Lalit comments on how Kali, the main protagonist, is naughty. “But you can teach a lot of things to young kids, like what RSS is about, the problems facing the nation, and those created by the Congress party.” He concludes by saying, “You come here to learn obedience. If you are obedient you will have a brighter future.” Kali is a recent entrant to the branch and has been coming for a month. He was attracted when he saw the other boys playing and joined them. He speaks of how he gets bored at school. The branch offers camaraderie and activity. He likes Lalit, who brings him to the branch, and teaches him new things. While he would like to go on playing, he accepts the authority of Lalit: “Sir, he’s older so I have to listen to him. I can’t do otherwise. He’s doing all this for me. He wants me to become a good boy.” The easy

FIGURE 4.1 The

Oath.

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acceptance of this hierarchical relationship is a re-enactment of patriarchal authority that is seen as being at the core of ‘Indian culture’. Unquestioned obedience to authority is the motor of the branch that individualises and totalises; through the idea of discipline and the control of individual bodies, the branch and the larger organisation aspire to exercise bio-political control (Foucault, 2008) of entire populations. The centrality of hierarchy and authority is visually established as the film cuts to archival footage of an RSS rally and then to a present-day Dussehra rally, where members in uniform with sticks march in unison to a martial tune (see Figure 4.2). A saffron flag presides over the proceedings. As the boys, including our protagonist Kali, salute the flag, the ritual significance of this act is pointed out by an older member: “In the RSS, we worship the saffron flag as our guru. The flag has existed from the time the nation began. It is a source of inspiration to us.” The hand gestures and the manoeuvres evoke memories of the Nazi salute (see Figure 4.3). A child’s voice sings, “O omnipotent Lord. We, the components of the Hindu Nation bow before you. We are prepared to serve your cause.” The film depicts how games draw the boys to the branch. These games aspire to make “brave men” out of boys. Games like Cockfight and Dhapa are about hitting your opponents and taking them down. The organization is built on this valorising of violent machismo. Lalit is a binding thread, who keeps on appearing, disciplining, leading, instructing and shaping the subjectivities of these young boys. The bio-political project is to channel their energies towards achieving the organisational goals. The connections between these everyday rituals of power and the larger ideology of RSS are articulated through inter-titles that punctuate the film (see Figure 4.4):

FIGURE 4.2 RSS

Street March.

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FIGURE 4.3 Kali

salutes.

FIGURE 4.4 Intertitles.

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We the children of heroic ancestors of peerless valour who for centuries braved and stamped out waves after waves of invading Muslims, accepted defeat at the hands of such a people. (Guruji Golwalkar, 2nd Supreme Commander of the RSS on the partition of India, Bunch of Thoughts, 1966, P. 152) Some of the games, played in almost all the branches of the RSS across India, are clearly linked to the expansionist agenda of the RSS, which believes in the idea of an ‘Akhand Bharat’, that encompasses the whole Indian subcontinent as a single political unit. The Game of Kashmir is played in a circle, where boys designated as ‘Kashmir’ are being dragged along by opposing teams, to the cries of “Who does Kashmir belong to?” to claim them as their own. Given the contestations and geopolitics around the Kashmir region, this is clearly a game to indoctrinate the boys into hard posturing towards Pakistan, which occupies part of the Kashmir valley. Both history and geography attain mythical proportions. The fragmented and diverse principalities and princely states of the Indian subcontinent become an imagined Akhand India that was populated by Hindu heroes like Shivaji, who strove to keep the ‘invaders’ (read Muslims) of this glorious ‘India’ at bay. In a local school that these children attend, the same ideas are reiterated as the teacher extols the virtues of Shivaji as the founder of the ‘Hindavi Swaraj’ (self-rule of the Hindus). The neighbouring Muslim rulers, who “did not allow the people to worship their own gods” are demonised. The games are metaphors of lethal war exercises, where one sacrifices one’s life for the ‘motherland’, the exclusive home of the Hindu race, “a phoenix, indestructible, immortal race with perennial youth” (Golwalkar, quoted in the film). The poems, songs and stories that circulate in the branch all point to this celebration of death as the ultimate heroic sacrifice that every member should be ready for: Why fear O Kabaddi Player Play, play the game fearlessly It is in the play That you discover life For what is death If it brings about a new life Your mere shadow dies here For you are immortal. (Excerpt from RSS poem on Kabaddi,9 by an unknown Pracharak, quoted in the film)

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There are many rituals and invocations to the courageous pantheon of Hindu ‘ancestors’ from God Ram to Lakshmibai, Chanamma, Rudramma, Rana Pratap and Shivaji, among others: pledges are made in the name of these august ancestors, to protect the purity of Hindu religion and culture, and ultimately the Hindu nation. The film repeatedly shows a house, where fulltime RSS members live, where they eat together, pray and spend time with each other. Some of them are old men, RSS pracharaks (preachers), who have dedicated their lives to the organisation. There is a memorable scene where members, young and old, share a meal, all the young boys in neat lines, while on the soundtrack a hymn is sung: Let us guru and disciple join together to protect one another. Share this meal. Wage war on our enemies. Become learned and devoted to god. Let there be peace. The juxtaposition of war and peace is ironical. The filmmaker plays with these ironies at multiple levels: There is another layer to the sound that I used as an additional ironic subtext. There’s the extra-diegetic humming of the old Hindi film song,10 “Jo vaada kiya tha nibhaana padega” (You have to fulfill the promise you made). I used it as in a wry reference to the Pratigya (oath) RSS volunteers must pledge that binds them to the organization. It is used extra-diegetically in the text, but the song was actually hummed by the cook while he was making rotis for the RSS pracharaks.”11 The film was made in 1992, at a point when the RSS and its affiliates (the BJP, Vishwa Hindu Parishad [VHP] and Bajrang Dal) were involved in a nationwide campaign for the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, as they claimed that it stood on the site of a Ram Temple. Many boys in the branch, including Kali, talk about the need to build a temple where the mosque stood. The Vijayadashami celebrations of 1992 in the film are an occasion to extend the movement to build the Ram Temple. Sripad, one of the main protagonists, compares this with India’s freedom struggle. He is proud of his role in it: After the struggle for independence, the next big movement involved Ram’s birthplace. I went there. In that holy environment, I felt that I also had a contribution to make. I had a very strong feeling that even if one has to die for the cause it’s worth it.

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This struggle for replacing a centuries-old mosque with a Ram temple is an enactment of the RSS ideology, which is stated in clear terms by Golwalkar and appears as intertext in the film: The foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea, but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture … or, they may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing. (Golwalkar, 1939, pp. 104–5) This Hindu nation is girded by new mythologies that eulogise the importance of sacrificing one’s life for this holy cause. Given the questionable role of the RSS and its allies in the freedom struggle, the invention of these stories of sacrifice for the nation are crucial to the bolstering of its cultural nationalist exclusionary politics. One of the stories that recurs and which, in the film, is narrated to the children, is the story of Gitti. Purushottam Patey tells the children about how six-year-old Gitti committed suicide, upon hearing that the British are only scared of devils, in order to haunt the British who attacked the branch. This story glorifies death, sacrifice and obedience to the organisation, in true fascist terms. As Sripad says: Dying and living are the same to me. If possible, I want to live for the RSS. But as a worker, I’m prepared to die for the organisation. It’s not just me, Sripad, saying this. Anyone who comes to the RSS will say this. We believe that the work of RSS is the work of God. Vachani, in his interview with the authors, talks about the Gitti story that the team filmed. He points out that the original story is in RSS shakha books for young children, and that the protagonist is a young boy named Kutty12 from Tamil Nadu, who performs a similar act against ‘Muslim invaders’ to protect the Kartikeya temple. In the original text, Kutty decides to take on the Muslims by jumping from the top of the temple and committing suicide, so as to become a ghost to scare the Muslims away. Thus, Kutty sacrifices his life for the temple and for the Hindu cause. We came across this story in its original form while doing research, and were interested in filming it. So we asked, “Do you tell this story in the shakha sometimes?” and this swayamsevak replied, “Yes, we do tell this story to our boys”. We arranged to film. But when we began filming, the story was miraculously changed for our camera as the RSS now wanted to project itself strategically as being part of the nationalist movement!

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So in this version for our camera, Gitti sacrificed his life for the RSS shakha, which was fighting for Indian independence against the British. We know that the RSS did not participate in the freedom movement. But they were trying to use the platform provided by my film to project this fabrication. … We decided to use this scene in the film nevertheless. We decided to use it because it showed the fascist ideology of the RSS in terms of the boy sacrificing his life for the branch, an act that the RSS saw as worthy of emulation.13 This kind of myth-making involving rewriting of historical events is the hallmark of the RSS and its affiliates even today. Mohan Bhagwat, who appears in the film, is at pains to deny the fascist character of the RSS: It’s been alleged that the RSS is a communal, fascist organisation. An organization that has no power or money, only love, can never be fascist. Fascism is enforced with sticks. We have nothing (the film shows RSS members marching with sticks, in an ironic visual comment). We have no law enforcing volunteers to come to the Branch. The film goes on to detail the events of December 1992, when, shortly after the film was shot, the Babri Mosque was demolished, leading to a spate of violence and more than 1,500 deaths and the banning of the RSS for the third time since independence. Towards the end of the film, RSS ideologue Golwalkar’s admiration for Hitler’s Nazi ideology is demonstrated through a quote from his writings: Germany has also shown how well now impossible it is for races and cultures having differences going to the root to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by. (Golwalkar, We or our Nation Defined, 1939, p. 88) The film goes back to the rapid pans of the boys running and shouting “Victory to mother India”; freezing on Kali’s image to the sound of an explosion (see Figure 4.5), thereby prophesying the turbulence that awaits India in the years to come. While Vachani uses apparently unobtrusive, handheld camera techniques, he is no ‘fly on the wall’ – he is able to critically engage with the protagonists and imbues his cinematic text with affective charge through camera movements and varying image volumes. The film unremittingly focuses on the bodies of the protagonists and the ways in which they navigate between release of raw energies and the disciplined and choreographed routines demanded by the organisation.

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FIGURE 4.5 Kali.

Vachani’s rapport with his characters is extraordinary. His calm, unobtrusive observation of protagonists and events brings out the chilling project of the RSS in ways that many other films on the issue have been unable to. I was always very clear that I was going to try and critique the organisation and its ideology – which I find reprehensible – but I tried not to misrepresent my characters belittle them, or make fun of them. And as happens in the making of most documentary films, you forge bonds with some of the people you film. I recognize that this is a fine balancing act – to maintain a political critique of the organisation while trying to represent individuals with a degree of fairness. I am not sure that it works in every scene in my films, but that is what I aspire to do. (Vachani in Khanna, 2019, p. 178) This rapport with the protagonists enables the film to represent the ‘everyday’ of the RSS. Vachani focuses on the daily repetitive games and exercises that inculcate the socially desirable qualities of obedience, discipline and masculinity. The film gestures towards the normality of this symbolic, internalised violence that can perhaps be marshalled when needed in spectacular acts of political aggression. This is hinted at in the display of paramilitaristic manoeuvres in the parade sequences. This focus on the normal and unremarkable ways in which Hindutva reproduces itself is perhaps prophetic; the contemporary mainstreaming of this exclusionary Hindu supremacist politics testifies to this. Some political documentaries with their focus on the spectacular, have tended to underplay this quotidian face of cultural nationalism in India. This is what makes the film all the more compelling and powerful in its vision and critique: In many parts of The Boy in the Branch, the focus is on what I call the ‘benign’ face of the RSS. For me personally, this benign face of the Sangh (with its community oriented, social welfare impetus deployed with a clear, ideological Hindutva thrust) is much more frightening than the malevolent or violent visage of the Sangh Parivaar (RSS family). But while

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the majority of my audiences understood the film for what it was trying to show, several people were disturbed by these gentle, banal and ordinary images of RSS men. (Vachani in Khanna, 2019, p. 179) This response of dismissing The Boy in the Branch for not being political or critical enough stems from a certain understanding of a political documentary, which must, in every frame, critique the Hindu right, to the point of making them appear as laughable or dismissible. Yet it is precisely a writing off the Hindu right that this film works against. The film strategically refrains from creating a caricature of Hindutva extremism. By combining the everyday, ‘normal’ images of the shakha (branch) going about its business with the quotes from their ideologues, notably Golwalkar, Vachani makes the point that these two — the banal routines of the branch and the fascist ideology of the RSS — are one and the same thing. This is what makes the RSS acceptable to a large number of individuals, making it common for many uppercaste parents to send their children to the shakha, because it is seen to inculcate discipline and positive values of obedience and sacrifice. In today’s times, when the new normal has become a not-so-soft Hindutva ideology, one can see how meticulously the RSS has worked over the years to build up the image of an organisation that is dedicated to service (e.g., disaster relief and rehabilitation), a social rather than a political organisation that is good for the moral fibre of young people. This is what Mohan Bhagwat also asserts in the film: “We cannot be fascists. Fascism survives on the basis of a powerful sanction. We only have affection for one another and empathy with the nation’s problems. As for communalism, a Hindu can never be communal.” The film cleverly problematises this position through the quotes it deploys from RSS writings. These strategic ways of disruption of the otherwise linear narrative perform the function of a Sutradhar,14 a non-diegetic, reflexive narrative deployment common in many local performative forms. In this way, recurrent narrative interventions nudge the viewers to a more open-ended, yet critical agentic reading of these quotidian routines of the branch, without offering a firm climactic closure, “to let the RSS narrate its own critique, as it were” (Vachani in Khanna, 2019, p. 174). In the context of the growing hold of Hindutva, there have been multiple attempts at contesting this discourse, from the more overt and direct political films that critically explore riots and pogroms, to films such as The Boy in the Branch and The Men in the Tree15 that work towards understanding the anatomy of fascist organisations, to other films that seek new ways of foregrounding resistance to the politics of exclusion and erasure. Vachani points out: This is particularly important as the Hindu nationalist project seeks a complete erasure of alternative forms of public memory, history writing, critical thought, story-telling, performance and art. Never has the need to

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preserve these alternative practices and spaces been stronger, or there been a greater need to document the many acts of everyday resistance against this onslaught of Hindutva politics. (Khanna, 2019, p. 181) Vachani, through his work, draws our attention to the need for political documentary in the Indian context to bear critical witness in myriad ways to the constructions of the self, the other and nationhood that pose a threat to both social justice and democracy. These political lodestones that impelled the anti-colonial struggles in the last century are today somewhat precariously poised in the global South. With the easy availability of digital image-making technologies and practices, there is a fragmented archive of struggles and everyday resistances circulating on social media that finds little space in the legacy media. This co-exists with a plethora of fake news and hate speech that oils the Hindutva propaganda machinery. Chai Darbari (Shekhar, 2019) explores these complex and contested spaces in post-digital globalised India. The title of the film alludes to Raag Darbari (1968), a satirical Hindi novel by Sri Lal Sukla. Shekhar says: “the only common theme binding the novel and the film is the spirit of free speech and not worrying about questioning things that are considered ‘sacred’”16 The Micropolitics of Emerging Public Spheres: Chai Darbari

Two wooden clogs crucified on an upright bamboo: an antenna, a lightning rod that reaches out to the stratosphere of turbulence, contestations, hope, despair and foreboding of conversations that follow. Monkeys dart like offkey musical notes – across the trees, the minarets, the temple domes, bathing ghats – minuets in a mysterious symphony. The river Sarayu in Ayodhya, relentlessly calm and layered (see Figure 4.6). Its white sands punctuated by the palpable tension of boys who play, men who pray, caste, politics, religion and a tea shop (see Figure 4.7). The air is thick with the memory of a storm. Chai Darbari17 opens to a conversation which lays bare the faultlines of caste that hits you like a static shock:

FIGURE 4.6 (a)

River Sarayu; (b) Monkey and the Dome.

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FIGURE 4.7 Tea

shop.

Tea shop Owner (TO): Hey, Listen! Last night someone tied Manik’s calf to the stand under my shop. The calf was hiding under the shop. When I came, I saw it had shoved its head inside. I tried to move it and saw that it was tied. That priest is a [Expletive]. He didn’t even use a rope. He had tied it with something strange. I couldn’t even cut it with a knife. I couldn’t open the knot Pandit: (off-screen) What are you trying to say? TO: (also off-screen, reaction shots of bystanders, including a monkey, over this entire exchange) You’re the one who blabbers! Pandit: Get lost [Expletive]! TO: You [Expletive], you get lost! Pandit: I will beat you up as if you are an untouchable. TO: You’re abusing, acting like a goon. Pandit: I feed that calf, I tie it, why are you bothered [Expletive]? TO: Again, you’re abusing! Pandit: (on-screen for the first time) You are the one into all kinds of trickery. Soon after, two men expatiate on the archeology of conflicts, where mythical Hindu temples “furiously sleep” under minarets. They invent imagined histories; invoke sedimented hate, opening a pinhole into the post-Modi camera obscura of a micro public sphere around a tea shop. Chai Darbari is an unusual film, set in the epicentre of a watershed moment in recent Indian history –the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The tea shop is sheer political theatre, where irreverential participants take the piss out of each other, on the one hand and on the other, there are exchanges of opposing points of view, offering the audience a ring side view of the emerging ‘vernacular’ public spheres in India (see Figure 4.8).

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FIGURE 4.8 Tea

shop discussions.

The film resonates with a calm, lyrical, yet subversive humour, deceptive like a snake in the grass. The snake in the grass is the toxic masculine politics of the Hindu Right that does not go uncontested in the film. When I started, I was basically trying to respond to this term post-truth. In a sense trying to understand it and also respond to it because I was feeling quite uneasy about the appropriation of this post-modernist idea, where everything has many aspects and everything has alternate facts and it all depends on which ideology you are looking at it from. Meanwhile, I was also trying to figure out the best way to look at it, and I thought of just focussing on one particular event and its memorialization. And most importantly, how it is verbalized. That’s why I wanted to shoot candid conversations rather than interviews.18 (Shekhar, 2019) The conversations meander, like the river — they reveal and conceal eddies of disquiet that mark the everyday of post-Modi India. A lone woman begins to discuss the biometrics of exclusion, and the inability of her marginal fingerprints to crack the elusive codes in the newly minted digital imagination of the ration shop. The Aadhar card is the new shining panopticon that bestows on its citizens nothing but the threat of taking away current entitlements: This new system is terrible. People have to miss a day’s wage to collect ration. If fingerprints don’t match, you will have to go again. We are expected to miss a day’s wage to get ration. … Usually my thumb print works, but last time my husband’s matched. Finally, we got it. It was a big relief. The dizzying density of conversations about Aadhar, the proposed Ram temple, and the protection of the marginalised caste groups through affirmative action bring out the ways in which the rhetoric of the ruling National

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Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) promises of “Achhe Din” (good times) and “Vikaas” (development) collide with the everyday experience of the citizens, particularly those at the bottom of the pile. These are contested terrains, for among the tea shop clientele, there are also many votaries of the re-centralised 56”19 hard state, and its Brahminical patriarchy, which seeks to undo the both the reservation policies and the SC/ST Atrocities Act:20 Man 1: A lower caste becomes a doctor despite having lesser marks. I am in favour of reservation that is based on poverty Man 2: Then upper castes will pretend to be poor. Man 1: No, no Man 2: Upper castes don’t want lower castes to be a part of the mainstream. Upper castes only want to see us as servants. Man 1: That’s your mental block TO: Upper castes drink tea here, but they will pay me from a distance. Man 1: And what about the lower castes? They abuse the upper castes Man 2: If they abuse you, then it’s also true that you abuse them. Casteism hasn’t and will never end. Its relation with politics will also never end. It will always continue this way Man1: Then your social status will reduce even more Man 2: Whatever is the result … People won’t accept and maybe it’s better if they don’t Man 1: You’re just forcing your argument! Give me half a cup of tea? Man 2: I supported BJP for 15 years, but now I understand their politics. Filming by an ‘outsider’ in fraught spaces, such as this one, is becoming increasingly difficult. This is partly due to the hesitation on the part of the subjects to voice their concerns in public because of the ubiquity of video and audio clips circulating on social media platforms. There is also fear of the way in which the state seeks to control the circulation of such free expression; the state’s jackboot response to social media posts that question its authority is a case in point.21 In Chai Darbari, however, the conversations are remarkably candid. This could be because the camera has become an ostensibly unobtrusive and disengaged observer: the participants are oblivious of its presence due to its being on location for a protracted period of time. On the other hand, the camera could also be a precipitator of action, an intercessionist “fly in the soup” (Breitrose, cited in Winston 1993, p.53), in a situation where participants have little recourse to express their dissent against the totalitarian state. The filmmaker sees it as the former: I was not having political conversations with anyone. I was just having day-to-day conversations with people. … My approach was that I will keep quiet and I will let conversations happen from their side. I didn’t

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want to initiate a conversation. First few days of shooting gave me confidence that this kind of strategy could work. If you are there for a very long time, people’s fascination with looking into the camera wears off and they get bored. Once this happens, people open up in a candid manner.22 Some of the calumny and hate in these conversations points to the mainstreaming of these discourses at the present juncture. Perhaps, within the earlier Nehruvian secularist framework, these ideas had little legitimacy and currency. Social media has amplified this circulation of hate speech and has implications for our practices as documentary filmmakers: an idea we will return to in the concluding section. WhatsApp videos form the narrative rumble strips of caution in the film. The recurrent and ubiquitous cell phones in the film are harbingers of the ominous narratives of hate; they layer the calm everyday of the riverbank (see Figure 4.9), adding a menacing undertone to the poetic sequences. While everyday spaces like the tea shop offer possibilities for dialogue, however contentious, these social media narratives are high-decibel interpellations, often going viral, exhorting mostly Hindus to rise up and attack the ‘other’, to redress their imaginary marginalised status in this nation. They are replete with post-truth, rumours and fake allegations and of course homophobia and violent exhortations to hate (see Figure 4.10): Wake up Hindus, wake up, otherwise you will be buried. If you don’t, your existence will be uprooted. Babur had come from Saudi Arabia and built a structure (Babri) for his lover. Hindus were sleeping then and are asleep now when Lord Ram statue is in a tent. So, I want you all to come to Ayodhya on 23rd in large numbers. And keep sharing this video. (Ashu Priya, a woman, on-screen for the first time.) So those circumcised Muslims get to know the reality of Babar. I am going to openly say that Babur was gay. And the Babri structure was made for his gay lover. It was not a mosque.

FIGURE 4.9 Man

with a cell phone.

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FIGURE 4.10 WhatsApp

Forward.

These extreme interpellations might appear to be different from the social media interactions and everyday conversations that many in India today engage in, with their friends, associates and relatives, in their otherwise genteel echo chambers. These conversations, under a veneer of politeness and circumspection, may not overtly display the visceral violence of these videos. Nevertheless, they presage the dominant stereotypes about the demonised other that have become mainstream and ‘normal’. They circulate in everyday conversations and in the media, with impunity. That is where the anxiety and disquiet of the film seizes you, becoming your own. There is a poignant, disturbing moment, later in the film, where a Hindu mob, in a WhatsApp video, forces a Bengali Muslim with a visual impairment to chant “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Lord Ram). While the first video discussed could possibly be dismissed as a hysterical and evidently distorted exhortation, this video, which witnesses the victim’s humiliation and his near-lynching, points to the blatant public enactment of the spectacle of toxic Hindutva masculinity that gets constantly documented and proudly circulated. This becomes, as it were, a demonstration of the mighty Hindu-Rashtra in waiting, that has no place for the minorities, a reminder and a warning to them and their ‘sickular’, ‘libtard’ supporters.23 Shekhar discusses why he thought of constructing the narrative by juxtaposing these very different strands: I was following the theme of conversation, memory, and event and also, at the same time, I was quite fascinated and partly disturbed by the propaganda shared on WhatsApp. … Before I started the film, I had a collection of 80–100 such videos as I was sure that at some point, I also want to work with the hate propaganda videos that will continue to infiltrate the internet. There were three or four terrains I was dealing with, and hence I kept collecting more hate videos as I was not sure how it would integrate into the film.24

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Like the non-diegetic narrative device of quotations from Hindutva ideologues deployed by Vachani, the WhatsApp videos become an uncomfortable narrative disruption, a Sutradhar, who draws the viewer back from the quiet witnessing of conversations and gentle meditative pace that mark much of the film; a curator, who provides context to the political ecosystem within which these conversations are being enacted. In the conversations, one finds, along with assertions of Hindu supremacy and upper caste privilege, also a subaltern resistance to this enactment of caste and gender relations of power; however, the videos are direct and violent in their attack on various ‘others’. Thus, the film, despite its foregrounding of the looming atmosphere of hate and intolerance, gestures towards the wisdom and critical insights of the many protagonists around this tea shop, who see through the machinations of the Hindu Right that have used Ayodhya as a springboard for political mobilisation. They have lived through the political drama that happens around Ayodhya. Some of them were extremely wise and said things like we have had a BJP MLA for the last thirty years but we haven’t had a new hospital or a new school. Others said that they know that Ayodhya is a political topic and there is nothing more to it. Once the temple is built, it will stop. … [T]heir thoughts have a lot of value, especially when it is coming from a space that has actually witnessed that event.25 The location of the subjects in time and space gives them a critical perspective on the demolition of Babri Masjid and its aftermath. What to the votaries of cultural nationalism appears to be a symbolic erasure of the signs of an invading other becomes to them a cynical appropriation that threatens their immediate issues of livelihood and peaceful co-existence. As one of the regulars at the tea shop asserts: DG: Ayodhya was always different from other pilgrimage spots because it was peaceful. And BJP has made Ayodhya a place of hostility. For residents of Ayodhya, there is nothing but sadness. We are living in filth but still praising Modi every day. We will live with shit but will still praise Modi, why? Leave Mumbai and Delhi, where are you? You are forced to live in a garbage yard, but still, we are worshipping Modi. In the name of showmanship, he fucked your ass. You have been pushed into darkness. Did you protest? The filmmaker talks about the reaction of the subjects to his representation of their space and their interactions:

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I showed them the conversations that I was shooting. They were laughing at it and said that this was their everyday and called it their Lok Sabha. And they were very proud about the fact that they had an atmosphere where they could abuse each other. They talk about whatever they want to talk about. … I was quite happy with this atmosphere because by that time in Delhi (where I live), people shied away from talking about contentious political topics. With the increasing polarisation, people had stopped giving public opinions, probably because they were losing friends over it. So, it was surprisingly nice to see people having conversations without any fear.26 In many ways, the conversations at the tea shop do not conform to the (secular) audiences’ expectations of a place that has been at the eye of a long political confrontation between the votaries of Hindutva and local Muslim population. The texture of the everyday, the possibility of being surprised could emerge only after a process of patient and sustained observation that underpins the process of making this film. I don’t know what it is about Ayodhya. … But it was an interesting space where people did not seem to be conforming to the grander narrative. Maybe that’s because they live in a town which is covered by the media on an everyday basis. So, they have a better sense and can kind of read through what is real and what is a farce. … Some of my friends who saw the film were surprised by the openness with which people spoke. After screening of the film in Trivandrum, Kerala, many could not believe that people in Northern India could dare to speak against the BJP. Especially, people living in Ayodhya.27 Towards the latter half of the film, the conversation veers to the event of demolition itself. That is a moment of epiphany. One realises with shock that one of the subjects, who has been extremely critical of Modi, has been a Kar sevak (volunteer) who participated in the demolition of the Masjid. He scolds another customer who claims to know all about what happened. DG: The previous evening … we crossed the river to carry food on tube boats. Understand? Police had instructed the Kar sevaks to approach the bridge in groups: “… and then we will stop you, but you will apply double force. Scatter as soon as you cross the bridge. We will pretend to hit you here and there; by then you would have entered the city.” Police had made a deal. Okay? The sounds of Aarti (evening prayer) drown the conversation. Dusk, like grief, cocoons the riverbanks. The past has a tryst with the present. Archival shots of the dome of the Masjid being chipped away. Destruction. A cow

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enigmatically gazes at viewers; pujaris and their lamps sway as if possessed by the demons of the past. At this liminal moment, a train slithers by to the rising crescendo of the music. That is when the film shifts from Ayodhya to Delhi. A car, with a Hanuman28 presiding over the dashboard, drives through the hurly-burly of the morning rush. A frothy dialogue between two women on FM radio marks the day: Heartfelt welcome and greetings from your favourite programme on AIR FM Gold! It’s time now to browse through history and remember events that made today’s date special. And today is 6th December 2017. Let’s take you back to 16th century. On today’s date in 1534, Spain laid foundation to Ecuador’s capital Quito. And in 1768, the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in Scotland, which is the oldest English language encyclopaedia still in production. The voices go on to chronicle what Mandela and Edison did on this day. The erasure is profound, the possibility of reconciliation lost, the complicity of the present regime conveniently forgotten. For the residents of Ayodhya, the shadow of the past persists. On the beeps to a radio frequency, a barber speaks intently into a cell phone on the riverbanks, while a young boy and an old priest sit together, bantering with each other. A low-angle shot of a man painting signs of hope on the dome of a mosque, taking one back to the scene of demolition many decades ago. The new replaces the old, but there is no forgetting the cataclysmic events of December 6, 1992: Former kar sevak: In Faizabad/Ayodhya, the polarisation had started since 1984. They kept failing. But after 3–4 years they succeeded during Durga Puja. Eventually Faizabad was burnt down. They burnt it such that it will take a 100 years for the gardens to blossom again. We are looking at them with suspicion. They are looking at us with suspicion. In an uncanny reference to the two crucified clogs in the beginning, the film closes with two seats, separated by an uneasy truce, lost in contemplation, waiting for redemption, for reconciliation, for hope (see Figure 4.11). The river, like the detritus of history, flows by. Singing in Difficult Times

Bhau Korde, one of the protagonists of our film Naata (The Bond), and a prominent activist from the Mohalla Committee (Neighbourhood Peace Committee) of Dharavi, Mumbai,29 reflects on their attempt to use documentaries in their conflict resolution work:

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FIGURE 4.11 Two

benches.

We brought some documentary films on communalism to show in Dharavi and when our boys saw these films, they said, “We can’t show these in Dharavi. All these shots of riots and all will create more problems among people”.30 This is what prompts Waqar and Korde to make their own film, which uses the language of popular Hindi cinema to make a case for living in harmony. When reflecting on their work and comparing it to the political films on communal violence and peace, Korde quips sarcastically: “It is true that secular people make good films, but these secular films are shown only to secular people and they have secular discussions!”31 In saying this, Korde is taking a pot shot at ‘political’ filmmakers like ourselves, whom he thinks end up speaking within our echo chambers. He does not see our films as having an understanding of the pulse of subaltern, heterogeneous audiences in places like Dharavi, Mumbai, where, he feels a different kind of cinematic language is called for, that engages with forms such as melodrama, which are often seen as anathema to the documentary. There is another moment in Naata, where a group of peace activists from Dharavi are discussing what kind of film should be made by us, the filmmakers, with them: Bhau Korde: If we’re making a film on communal harmony, what should be in it? S.N. Hankare: A simple direct film with a point of view that no religion teaches us to hate each other. N.R. Paul: The film shouldn’t just appeal to the head but to the heart. It should have stories of the riot affected. S.N. Hankare: That would only imply that riots are bad. But it wouldn’t help change people’s mindsets about the other. It’s important that people shouldn’t harbour such feelings.

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In this exchange, Hankare is pointing to what he regards as the limitations of films that focus only on extreme events of communal violence. He thinks that they lose out on addressing the fabric of the everyday, the normalised prejudices that communities have about each other. He thinks that films should go beyond telling us what is going wrong and point out ways in which all of us are complicit in the extreme forms of violence that are only manifestations of deep-rooted fault lines and prejudice. In many ways, the two films we have discussed in this chapter address this zone of everyday transactions. While they are not in the business of changing mindsets, which is a complex matter, involving much more than screening and discussing films, they do try to understand the fine texture of prejudice through a close observation of people and spaces. While their observation is non-intercessionist, they are in no way neutral or unclear about the stand that they take on prejudice and the politics of hate. Their position emerges through the encounter with other kinds of textual devices and the way they are edited. In the case of The Boy in the Branch, it is the intertexts that present the Hindu supremacist ideology of the RSS. In the case of Chai Darbari, it is the syntax of the film and its use of popular WhatsApp videos, texts that interpellate the viewers to hate the other and to act on this hate. Both films call upon the viewer to read the multi-layered cinematic text, to engage with it and form their own judgements, rather than sending them messages that allow them to easily identify with the position of the filmmaker in a polar battle between good and evil. The films in this chapter defy closures based on binaries and are ‘open-ended’, specifically looking at the quotidian manifestations of ‘dividing practices’, yet unflinching in their critical ‘observation’. As discussed earlier, the existing body of political cinema, significant though it is, tends to marshal evidentiary narratives about spectacular transgressions of India’s secular constitutional framework, often failing to implicate authorial and spectator positions. Vachani recognises its import, but also sees its limitations, particularly in setting the norms for what constitutes political cinema. This sometimes ends up as seeing films like The Boy in the Branch or Chai Darbari as not ‘political enough’ because they involve work on the part of the audience to read and understand them. Singing in the Times of WhatsApp

The idea of non-fiction watching was practically non-existent in the days when both state funded and alternative documentary films were being made and circulated. The fiction film industry, in its Hindi or regional variants, reigned supreme. Today, the media ecology has changed drastically. People are watching a plethora of non-fiction (and non-documentary) narratives

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through social media and the Internet, from cooking shows to political propaganda to standup comedy. Political battles today are being fought on WhatsApp and Twitter, so much so that political parties invest heavily in their social media presence and platforms such as WhatsApp have had to change their rules in order to check the flow of rumours. Dasgupta (2020), based on his engagement with Gauseva32 WhatsApp groups, which form an important strand in the reproduction of Hindutva politics at a grassroots level, argues that such groups facilitate the development of “a vocabulary and ethics of politics that crosses the boundary of discourse into the economies of desire and affect”. Hindutva politics thrives on this mobilisation of affective energies: In the milieu of utterances that such a WhatsApp group forms, what is achieved is a discursive territorialisation of affect. In database ontology, the mobile phone “notifies” the user upon the receipt of each message. This moment, marked visually and aurally by the device’s interface constitutes an affective demand, which is resolved by the reading of the text, the reception of the utterance. The frequency, and the consistency and range constitute a territorialisation in normalising and habituating the recipient to the interpretive, paradigmatic and moral stances of the Hindu rashtra ideology. (Dasgupta, 2020, p.71) What happens to the political documentary in this space of image overflows? When ‘fake news’ and powerful appeals to affective energies in the form of exhortations to hate and destroy the other circulate virally, what happens to the positioning of the political documentary as a voice of reason and evidentiary certainty? Do we have to rethink the straitjacketed forms in which we have tended to circumscribe the political? Vachani points to this fragmented nature of images (and attention spans) in the present context, as well as the way the digital allows for a complete repositioning of any documentary text to change its meaning: Even in the era of the early, classical political documentary, films were not sacrosanct in terms of how they were circulated and viewed and footage could be selected and manipulated. … A wonderful example of this is Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog” which uses Riefenstahl’s footage to subvert the grandeur of the rise of National Socialism by intercutting with the horror of the concentration camps to make a film that is powerfully anti-fascist, and an emotive and powerful paean for peace. It is important to note that these forms of selection, manipulation or reframing can be done with, or within any film text. We could do this with Hindu nationalist documentaries to try to use these texts against their ideology, but

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equally the RSS could manipulate my films, or your films, or Anand Patwardhan’s films to work against the actual context and meaning of these films. … The question is: why would anyone bother with the footprint of the modest secular political documentary, when you have the entire canvas of post-truth, fake News to work with, which the Sangh Parivar has effectively deployed and almost made into a strategic art-form for political mobilization via WhatsApp and social media …?33 He goes on to affirm that this means that as documentary filmmakers, we need to have a more nuanced, perhaps more humble understanding of what a political text should be like and what it can do to the viewer: Vachani: I think it’s a narrow understanding of the ‘political’ coming from this position that militates against a diversity of form in the political documentary. I am not sure I really understand where this is coming from. It seems to originate from the flawed idea that there are certain magical properties to our films … that they magically and decisively impact the behaviour of our audience. So a film can stop communal rioting, another film can incite people to riot, yet another might seduce or lure people into joining the RSS shakha. Interviewer:  It’s a hypodermic model, as if communication has direct ‘effects’ on the audience and triggers behavioural changes in them … Vachani: Like this is going to fan the flames in some ways … and there is little evidence that audiences react to documentary films in this way … Interviewer: It’s also an underestimation of audience’s intelligence.34 We would like to invoke a conversation between filmmaker Anand Patwardhan and one of his subjects, over an image, in the 1990s, when digital image processing technologies were first entering the space of popular image-making: In Anand Patwardhan’s documentary Father, Son and Holy War (1995) there is an interesting exchange between the filmmaker and a woman holding an image of Roop Kanwar, one of the victims of Sati. The image she is holding up shows Roop Kanwar in a prostrate position, with a god sitting on a nearby tree, sending laser-like beams that light up the pyre on which she is lying. The filmmaker expresses incredulity when the woman asserts that the picture is indeed real. He enquires whether god could be

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photographed thus. She replies affirmatively, in a matter-of-fact manner. Patwardhan asks her whether god would show up if he were to shoot right now, to which she replies that god would appear, if he were present there. It is interesting and paradoxical that Patwardhan uses the images he creates as evidence to make the point that images are unreliable as evidence. The very technology that has been developed to acquire reality is now being used to reconfigure it. (Jayasankar and Monteiro, 2016, p. 70) In his recent epic film Reason, which deploys a wide array of audiovisual artefacts, Patwardhan continues on this trajectory of using cinema as a tool to make the viewer aware of the machinations and destructive energy of the Hindu supremacist Sangh Parivar and the shadowy way in which it orchestrates murders, lynchings, suicides and repression of free speech. This is a significant work that needs to be watched widely in these difficult times. Simultaneously, we also need to broaden our understanding of the political in this age of a plethora of instantaneous and powerful images, where the image has become a crucial terrain of struggle. From memes to standup comedy to short narratives of movements and alternative leaders, all these forms of counter speech circulate on social media. The political documentary now has to take this plenitude of narratives and images onboard, in its exploration of new ways of showing and telling. What is noteworthy about the film Chai Darbari is the way in which it embeds the immersive context of social media within the cinematic text, making it a part of the public sphere that the filmmaker carefully observes, in which ideas are being debated and positions being asserted. In our conversation with the filmmaker, quoted earlier, he speaks about how the film itself was a response to the surfeit of hate videos and various versions of events that have been circulating both on social media and on mainstream media channels. This provoked the need to go back to a watershed event in the history of the nation, an event that was a powerful assertion of Hindu supremacist ideology, and which is still remembered and memorialised in different ways. Somewhere, the fact that those who were at the epicenter of the event and participated in it now critically reflect back on what happened and how the Hindu right took them and their town for a ride, points to signs of hope. Beyond all the hype and excess, there are realisations that point to a critical, subaltern understanding of both the past and the present political scenario. In these saffron times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing of counter-narratives against hate and exclusion in the mainstream and social media. These precarious songs of resistance, using a plenitude of forms, styles and voices, will endure and, perhaps, transcend our received notions of political documentaries.

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Towards the Multiplicity of Southern Aesthetics?

The search for a Southern aesthetics that seeks to break with its colonial past must perhaps take onboard the multiplicity of local and subaltern artistic, performative and philosophical traditions that have subversive potential. This is not to valorise all tradition as inherently good and modernity as bad, which is the converse of the colonial project. Nor is it to celebrate the reinvention of tradition by Hindutva ideologues, that seeks to define a monolithic, certain version of tradition (read Hinduism) that is conflated with the Indian nation. Rather it is to recognise the strands of subversion of caste, religious and gender relations of power that find expression in popular musical, performative and storytelling forms. It is to understand what it is that gives these forms the power to resist orthodoxy and to draw inspiration from them for broadening the ambit of the political documentary. Spivak critically engages with an attempt to document indigenous traditions in South Africa. She critiques the idea that indigenous knowledge systems become mere data in this enterprise and asks “how [can] these knowledge systems … supplement the imagination of the global” (Spivak, 2005, p. 484). Often science from the Global North becomes the benchmark to assess them. She emphasises the need to maintain a critical gaze, using the example of the Hindu right and its deployment of “Vedic science” in justifying its claim to Hindu supremacy. In the ‘Indian’ context, there are several indigenous artistic and philosophical traditions, which are reflexive, subversive, non-indexical and militate against human-centric dualism. These traditions subvert the dichotomy between form and content, between the affective and the rational, between spectators and performance, between creators and their creations. For instance, the performative device of the Sutradhar, discussed earlier, reflexively draws attention to the constructed nature of the narrative and its multiple diegetic inflections. Dominant notions of Western realist practices do not find a place in the mode of address here: a Kathakali performer might disregard the conventions of ‘realism’ and adjust his headgear or his garments during the course of a performance, without effecting any narrative disruption.35 The audience is an affective presence in the performance, often participating in and witnessing its construction. Eric Michael’s reflections on Warlpiri Aboriginal art and video practices gesture towards this “indistinctness of boundaries between authorship and oeuvre” (Michaels, 1994, p. 105). Visual practices in several little traditions deny the centrality of the spectator, constructed in and through relationships of power, which is a legacy of the Enlightenment (Berger, 1972). Documentary film in general, and political documentary in particular, has been haunted by the spectre of epistephilia (the will to knowledge), in the process disregarding the possibilities of other modes of engagement with the

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documentary narrative (Rutherford 2011, Nichols, 1991). Rutherford (2011, p. 280) points to how the notion of affect has rarely figured in the debates around documentary film spectatorship, creating antinomies between the journalistic and the aesthetic. The political film thus emerges as a ‘film of fact’, as an evidentiary artefact, that has to be apprehended through language and reason rather than through its affective charge of image and sound: There is a valorisation of the idea of a matter-of-fact language, free from aesthetics, in which to talk about the world, and a sense of the corrupting power of aesthetics and by extension of affect – that aesthetics and affect threaten the credibility of the documentary. If you read between the lines of this suspicion of aesthetics, it seems to carry with it an idea that the image itself is suspect, the image has to be contained, kept under control, pinned down in a hierarchical relation between image and word. (Rutherford, 2011, p. 277) The postulation of documentary spectatorship in terms of a rational, autonomous subject, with an aspiration to seize “a referent, a real, which is already complete, formed and unchanging” (Rutherford, 2011:278) denies the emergence of an “embodied spectatorship” of documentary text and at most privileges’ cathartic moments of identification (Rutherford, 2011:279). Drawing on Michael Taussig’s formulation of mimesis and Walter Benjamin’s idea of “mimetic innervation”, she explores how documentary film could move away from the will to knowledge in order to forge an affectively engaged spectatorship. Affect is either a moment of “visual epiphany”, which disrupts the “linear logic of narration” (Rutherford, 2011, p.280), or continuous, as a “rumble track – it is always there, setting up our nerves on edge” (2011, p.285). The former is consistent with the epistephilic formulation of documentary, whereas the rumble track of affect evokes a bodily response. The Boy in the Branch uses different registers, making the audience shuttle between an engagement with the quotidian spaces of the branch and the somewhat cold text that appears almost as a speed breaker that disrupts the narrative flow. In Chai Darbari, the calm observation of the tea shop, punctuated by the volatile and viscerally disturbing social media artefacts, also sets up these rumble tracks of affect. Both complicate the ideas of documentary spectatorship, opening up the possibility of an embodied relationship. In our Kachchh Trilogy, mentioned earlier, we explore the lived Sufi traditions of pastoral communities, through the quotidian sounds and images of Kachchh, a region located in the border between India and Pakistan (Rutherford, 2014). Sufism, like many other little traditions, questions the idea of certainty and univocal interpretations. In one of the films of the trilogy, So Heddan So Hoddan (Like Here Like There, 2011), Haji Umar, a protagonist, professes his love for the poetry of the medieval Sufi bard Shah

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Abdul Latif Bhitai;36 he cites its openness to multiple exegetic possibilities to underline its profundity and significance in his life: One of the learned men was given a couplet from Bhitai’s work – just a couple of lines. He interpreted it in 360 different ways and made a huge volume. He took it to Bhitai, who told him that even you spend a lifetime, your interpretation will remain incomplete. This is the greatness of Bhitai’s work. What more can one say of it! The first film in the trilogy, Do Din Ka Mela (A Two Day Fair, 2009), presents the work of a Dalit uncle-nephew duo, who sing the verses of Sant Kabir. Kabir,37 an unlettered weaver by profession and a Bhakti poet, critiqued the orthodoxies of both the religions that impinged on his life, slipping “through the fingers of both Islam and Hinduism” (Mehrotra 2011: XXII). His work unravels the human subject as “only clay, a leaky pot, a jug with nine holes” (Mehrotra, 2011, p.117). He is sung all across the Indian subcontinent and has various inflections, like many other oral traditions, depending on its evolution within the context and concerns of the communities – from Dalits to upper castes. His ‘oeuvre’ is a reminder of the many modes that are inherent in any interpretative practice, allowing for a million meanings to bloom.38 Certainty of readings is a harbinger of epistemological and cultural violence, violence that emanates from impoverishing the fecundity of meanings and disallowing ambiguities and multiplicities. The contemporary politics of hate and xenophobic violence could be attributed to the inability to recognise and negotiate with this plenitude of identities and meanings. “Reconfiguring meaning as a terrain of struggle and a site of dynamic ideological encounter is not a stylistic practice, not just a formal strategy, but is a subversion of dominant ways, a disruption of the materiality of social practice” (Jayasankar and Monteiro, 2016:191). We feel that such political-aesthetic artistic interventions are particularly significant for South Asia, because of the shared and ongoing concerns around growing conservatism, authoritarianism and polarised relationships between majority and minority communities. In the wake of public protests, in India, against laws and state interventions, such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA 2019) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC)39 that seek to disenfranchise and deny citizenship to Muslim minorities, for instance, there have been many conversations about these everyday relations and about how the problem of religious polarisation is as much a social one – where even the liberal society is complicit – as it is a political one.40 By their open-ended, yet strategic embodied juxtaposition of disparate visual materials, and an avoidance of an instrumental climactic closure, with a commitment to interpretational possibilities, The Boy in the Branch

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and Chai Durbari open pathways to question received notions of political documentaries in India. In doing so, they also point to new ways that draw on fluid, subaltern artistic traditions that have much to offer for the reimagination of the political documentary and its spectatorship in the Global South. Notes 1 For more on the genesis and dynamics of this movement and its political manifestations, refer to Gopal, 1991. 2 Hindutva (Hindu-ness) is an ideological project of the Hindu right to propagate a unitary, homogenised version of Hinduism and to establish a theocratic Hindu-nation. 3 Other nation-states in the Indian subcontinent and beyond have also witnessed an upsurge of religious fanaticism and political turmoil. See, for instance, Kenji Isezaki, Mubashar Hasan, Sameer Yasir (Eds), 2019. 4 The film Padmavat (2017) faced resistance from an upper caste group, who claimed the film shows the Rajput community, to which the titular figure belongs, in “bad light”. The screenings of the film had to be suspended in many parts of India, though it had a certificate from CBFC. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/ what-is-padmavati-controversy-10-developments-on-sanjay-leela-bhansalis-film-1776389, accessed on March 20, 2021. 5 On 15 August 1984, after the unconstitutional dismissal of NT Rama Rao (NTR) of the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) engineered by the Indian National Congress party, there was an attempt to bring in a new Chief Minister. The ensuing power struggle within the TDP party, with support from various other opposition parties like the BJP, led to clashes between Hindus and Muslims. Over 50 people lost their lives and there was extensive looting and damage to property. 6 The Sangh Parivar denotes the collective of Hindutva outfits such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal. 7 Godhra Tak: The Terror Trail (2003), by Shubhradeep Chakravorty, is an investigative documentary exploring this train burning of 2002. 8 This is far from an exhaustive list of films on the issue. We have just identified a few important exemplars. 9 Kabaddi is a team-based Indian contact sport. 10 From the film Taaj Mahal (1963). 11 Vachani in his communication to the authors, March 29, 2021. 12 A common unisex- multi-religious South Indian name/diminutive. 13 Lalit Vachani in conversation with the authors, 5 October 2019. 14 Sutra in Pali and Sanksrit denoted thread, and Dhar is the bearer; a Sutradhar dynamically interacts and weaves the narrative. 15 The Men in the Tree (2002) is Vachani’s sequel to The Boy in the Branch, where he returns to his previous protagonists after eight years and explores both their personal trajectories within and outside the RSS. It also has a more explicit critique of the organisation through the voices of former RSS members. 16 Prateek Shekhar in communication with the authors, 16 March 2021. 17 The title alludes to Raag Darbari, a well known Hindi novel, a political satire, by Sri Lal Sukla, published in 1968. 18 Prateek Shekhar in conversation with the authors, 21 September 2019. 19 The allusion here is to Modi’s valorising of his 56” chest as a sign of machismo leadership.

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20 The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is a law that was passed by the Parliament of India to prevent atrocities and hate crimes against the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. 21 There are numerous instances of the state and vigilante groups responding violently to dissent. A recent example is the arrest of a young environmental activist, Ms. Disha Ravi, on charges of sedition (The Wire [2021]). 22 Prateek Shekhar in conversation with the authors, 21 September 2019. 23 “Sickular” and “libtard” are derogatory terms coined by the Hindu right to denote ‘secular liberals’, who are seen as a threat to their cultural nationalist project. 24 Prateek Shekhar in conversation with the authors, 21 September 2019. 25 Prateek Shekhar in conversation with the authors, 21 September 2019. 26 Prateek Shekhar in conversation with the authors, 21 September 2019. 27 Prateek Shekhar in conversation with the authors, 21 September 2019. 28 Hanuman is a monkey god and an important character in the Ramayana. 29 Dharavi is an old fishing neighbourhood that has, over the years, grown into a large informal settlement, a hub of the informal sector, often erroneously designated as Asia’s largest “slum”. 30 Interview with Korde, December 2015. 31 Naata: The Bond (2003) 32 Gauseva (Cow-service) is an important plank that Hindu Right-wing organisations use to mobilise the Hindu majority against Dalits and religious minorities, who are seen as ‘unclean’ beef eaters. Since 2014, there have been several cases of lynching based on rumours of cow slaughter or trade, in which cow protection activists have killed or maimed Muslims and Dalits. 33 Lalit Vachani in communication with the authors, 29 March 2021. 34 Lalit Vachani in conversation with the authors, 5 October 2019. 35 Kathakali is one of the six traditions of Indian classical dance, originating in Kerala. 36 Shah Ablul Latif Bhitai, (1689–1782) is a Sindhi Sufi poet, who wrote Shah Jo Rissalo, a collection of poems, that is sung by communities throughout Kachchh and Sindh provinces. Hie is said to be influenced by Islam, Advaita and Sikhism. 37 Kabir is a 15th century weaver-poet, who lived in in the ancient city of Varanasi, India. 38 Do Din ka Mela (A Two Day Fair, 2009) 39 The Citizenship Amendment Act passed in 2019, is ostensibly to help refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh before 2015 and from Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Christian and Parsi religions. The Amendment excludes Muslims from these nations. Read in conjunction with the NRC, which has been implemented in Assam, to incarcerate those who cannot produce documents to prove their status as Indian citizens, this act is discriminatory as it will mean that Muslims without sufficient ‘proof’ could be rendered stateless. 40 See, for instance, US-style polarisation has arrived in India. Modi is at the heart of the divide (Masih and Slater, 2019), which indicates the sharp divides within families based on PM Modi’s exclusionary electoral politics. https://www.washingtonpost. com/world/asia_pacific/divided-families-and-tense-silences-us-style-polarizationarrives-in-india/2019/05/18/734bfdc6-5bb3-11e9-98d4-844088d135f2_story.html

References Battaglia, G. (2018) Documentary Film in India: An Anthropological History. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing, London: BBC and Penguin. Brecht, B. (1987). Motto, in Willett, J. and R. Manheim, eds., Brecht Poems 1913– 1956. New York: Routledge.

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Dasgupta, A. (2020), Gauseva by WhatsApp: Hindu Nationalism and Online Mobilisation. In Monteiro, A, K.P. Jayasankar and A.S. Rai, eds., DigiNaka — Subaltern Politics and Digital Media in Post-capitalist India, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. ———. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978— 1979, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ghosh, S. (2004). Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms, Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/ Media. Delhi: Sarai. pp. 447–454. Golwalkar, M.S. (1939). We or Our Nation Defined. Nagpur: Bharat Publications. Available at: https://sanjeev.sabhlokcity.com/Misc/We-­or-­Our-­Nationhood-­Defined-­ Shri-­M-­S-­Golwalkar.pdf [Accessed 8 December 2023] ———. (1966). Bunch of thoughts. Vikrama Prakashan; sole distributors: Rashtrotthana Sahitya. Gopal, S. ed. (1991). Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India, Delhi: Penguin. Isezaki, Kenji, Mubashar Hasan, and Sameer Yasir (Eds), 2019. Radicalization in South Asia: Context, Trajectories and Implications, India: Sage. Jayasankar, K.P. and Anjali Monteiro (2016). A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India. New Delhi: Sage. Khanna, L. (2019 [2017]). Interview with Lalit Vachani. Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 9(2), 173–82. doi: 10.1386/safm.9.2.173_1 Kishore, S. (2020). The practice and politics of radical documentary circulation A case-study of tactical media in India. In Presence, S. M. Wayne, and J. Newsinger, eds., Contemporary Radical Film Culture- Networks, Organisations and Activists. London: Routledge. Masih, N. and Slater, J. (2019). US-style polarization has arrived in India. Modi is at the heart of the divide, The Washington Post, May 20, 2019. Available at: https:// www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/divided-families-and-tense-silencesus-style-polarization-arrives-in-india/2019/05/18/734bfdc6-5bb3-11e9-98d4844088d135f2_story.html [Accessed 25 September 2022] Mehrotra, A.K. (2011). Songs of Kabir, New Delhi: Hachette. Michaels, E. (1994). Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Monteiro, A. and Jayasankar, K.P. (2014). REMEMBERING 1992. [online] REMEMBERING 1992. Available at: http://mumbairiots.tiss.edu/ [Accessed 15 September 2019]. Nichols, B. (1991). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rutherford, A. (2011). What Makes a Film Tick? Cinematic Affect, Materiality and Mimetic Innervation. Bern: Peter Lang. ———. (2014). Filming Transience, Affirming Resilience. Art India, XVIII(3), 45–47. Spivak, G. (2005). Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular. Postcolonial Studies, 8(4), 475–486. The Wire. (2021). Delhi Police Arrests Climate Activist Disha Ravi, 21, for Editing Toolkit for Peaceful Protest. [online] Available at: https://thewire.in/government/ delhi-police-arrests-21-year-old-bengaluru-climate-activist-in-protest-toolkit-case [Accessed 16 March 2021]. Winston, B. (1993). The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription. In Renov, M. (ed.) Theorizing Documentary. London: Routledge, pp. 37–57.

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Filmography Chakravorty, S. (2003). Godhra Tak: The Terror Trail, New Delhi: Chakravorty. Dhanraj, D. (1986). Kya Hua Iss Shaher Ko (What happened to this city?). Berlin: Arsenal. Monteiro, A. and K.P. Jayasankar (2003). Naata: The Bond, Mumbai: TISS. Monteiro, A. (2009). Do Din ka Mela, Mumbai: TISS. ———. (2011). So Heddan So Hoddan, New Delhi: PSBT. ———. (2017). A Delicate Weave, Mumbai: TISS. Pasricha, T.K. (2017) 1984, When the Sun Didn’t Rise. Mumbai: Pasricha. Patwardhan, A. (1991). Ram Ke Naam (In the Name of God) Mumbai: Patwardhan. ———. (1995). Father, Son and Holy War. Mumbai: Patwardhan. ———. (2002). War and Peace. Mumbai: Patwardhan. ———. (2018). Reason. Mumbai: Patwardhan. Sadiq, M. (1963), Taaj Mahal, Mumbai: Nadiadwala, A.K. Sasi, K.P. (2016), Voices from the Ruins: Kandhamal in Search of Justice. Bangalore: Visual Search. Sawhney, N.S. (2015). Muzaffarnagar Baki Hai, New Delhi: Sawhney. Sharma, R. (2003). Final Solution. Mumbai: Sharma. Shekhar, P. (2019). Chai Darbari, New Delhi: Shekhar. Vachani, L. (1993). The Boy in the Branch: A Wide Eye Film for South, Channel 4 TV. ———. (2002). The Men in the Tree: Wide Eye Film.

5 LOCAL REALISM Indian Independent Film as a Socio-political Medium Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram

In the 21st century, the premise of a visual aesthetic specific to Indian cinema has invariably circled around commercial Hindi films, commonly known as Bollywood. This idea of a contemporary Indian film aesthetic is undergirded by ‘adherence to traditional concepts of honour, romance and beauty’ (Pugsley, 2016: 97) which are formulaic elements in Bollywood films. Thriving South Indian Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada film industries have fashioned their own individual aesthetic styles and sensibilities, but the specious and tenuous concept of a cinematic or national monoculture notwithstanding, Bollywood has to a large extent dominated the imagination of a unitary Indian popular culture. The ostensibly autochthonous aesthetic of the Bollywood industry is typified by films that ‘look sound and feel different’, with the caveat for uninitiated western audiences that ‘cinematic culture shock may accompany a first prolonged exposure’ (Lutgendorf, 2006: 227). The Bollywood masala film – an extravagant concoction of escapist song and dance romance and action melodramas – has been brandished as a symbol of national pride, cultural uniqueness and India’s soft power, particularly since India’s neoliberal turn in the early 1990s (Devasundaram, 2016a). Often swept under the carpet are the more problematic dimensions of this unisonant and uncritical coronation of Bollywood as the potentate of Indian cinema and culture. In the scramble to establish the cultural distinctiveness of Bollywood as unimpeachably Indian, the industry and its filmic products have demonstrated a propensity to gloss over, simplify, banalise or disregard exigent Indian socio-political issues. Bollywood films have often relegated to the shadowlines already marginalised minority groups such as Muslims, Dalits and the LGBTQ communities, whilst upholding hegemonic patriarchal structures and a Hindu DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832-5

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majoritarian ideology that has underpinned the Indian zeitgeist under Narendra Modi’s ruling right-wing Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime since 2014. Scholars have traced the genealogy of Bollywood to folk traditions, devotional and mythological narratives and urtexts, rituals and representational practices invariably stemming from Hinduism whilst indicating some Islamicate influences in the aesthetic of popular Hindi cinema (Dwyer, 2006; Bhaskar & Allen, 2009). Whilst the Bollywood industry infrastructure and workforce have been constituted by a melting pot of multi-religious production personnel and iconic film stars, the default ideological and identitarian lodestone has invariably leaned heavily towards a Hindu majoritarian orientation. In the contemporary focus of this chapter, the seemingly ineluctable ascent of the BJP under the premiership of Narendra Modi has implicated Bollywood’s prominent role in propagating the singular brand of the BJP’s Hindutva-hued political and neoliberal populism. Sanjeev Kumar (2013: 465) frames the Bollywood film industry as ‘a significant agent in shaping popular culture in India’ that has simultaneously and ‘passionately endeavoured to produce a nationalist cinema with an unflinching commitment towards the ideology of Hindutva nationalism’. Similarly, Rana Ayyub (2019) notes the synchronicity between the BJP’s political strategy to secure Hindu supremacy and Bollywood’s compliant culture of silence: Under the leadership of the BJP, India has witnessed a systematic campaign of othering Indian Muslims, frequent lynching, communal riots, farmers’ protests, growing impoverishment due to failed fiscal policies, etc. Yet those in Bollywood who have not openly endorsed the BJP have remained remarkably silent on these issues. In fact, leading lights of the Indian film industry who have expressed admiration for Hollywood stars speaking truth to power (specifically against the Trump administration) in the United States have had nothing to say about the hate crimes and bigotry raging in their own country. (Ayyub, 2019) When viewed through the prism of Bollywood’s increasing subservience to and endorsement of supremacist Hindutva ideology under the auspices of the BJP and its affiliate organisations, the association of Bollywood films with the idea of an ‘authentic’ indigenous Indian aesthetic constitutes a double-edged sword. Bollywood’s co-optation into the ruling government’s Hindutva agenda and branding as an instrument of monocultural soft power invokes questions about the uncritical valorisation of Bollywood as an archetypically and aesthetically Indian ‘national’ cinematic form. This is because Bollywood’s Indian aesthetics have been claimed as the canvas for a violently divisive Hindutva political dispensation in a contemporary Indian milieu. The

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present picture of India is punctuated by the suspension of constitutional and civil liberties, muzzling of media freedom, suppression of political dissent, arbitrary arrest of activists, yoking of farmers to an indiscriminate multinational corporatisation drive. A rising tide of nativist exceptionalism and nationalist chauvinism seems concomitant with Bollywood’s own aesthetic and filmic grammar, as noted by Kumar: The vicious nexus between nationalist cinema and expansion of Hindutva ideology thus plays a subversive role in engendering a sense of disembeddedness among Indian Muslims. … Films possess the uncanny knack of weaving into their stories highly charged political issues cloaked in a suitably non-political garb of pure kitsch. Hindi films have done this dexterously by elaborately projecting the cultural hegemony of the Hindu majority over the minority Muslims and, in this way, have seriously engaged in the politics of nationalism. (Kumar, 2013: 465–467) In this chapter, I will reorient the concept of Indian aesthetics around a socio-politically attuned new wave of independent Indian films, that elsewhere I have positioned as an alternative, and in some cases, antithetical discourse to Bollywood (Devasundaram 2016b, 2018). As a glocal film form, several new Indian ‘Indie’ films blend globally accessible formal and stylistic approaches and locally themed socio-politically interrogative content. In effect, the new Indies exhibit a more transgressive ethos and hybridised morphology. Rather than claiming credentials of unadulterated Indian endogeneity, the Indie new wave exhibits an acculturation sculpted by transglobal cultural flows (Appadurai, 1996). The Indie films’ globally relatable aesthetic fusion of film form and style – synthesising local and international cinematic sensibilities – is amplified by their increasing absorption into the catalogues of web streaming giants Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. A comparative glance at Nigerian Nollywood filmmakers gaining global exposure through affiliation with Netflix is exemplified by Kunle Afolayan, whose films The CEO (2016) and Citation (2020) substantiate how local and regional Nigerian social, political and cultural mores are being filtered through a local-meets-global aesthetic template. Therefore, the shift towards a universalizing ‘Netflix aesthetic’ seems the more clear and present probability – a template that folds regional aesthetic nuances and granular local particularities into a globally legible visual blueprint, thereby perturbing further the concept of an unadulterated national film aesthetic. I therefore contend that in terms of the new Indian Indies, Indian aesthetics (emphasizing the plurality and uncategorisable multidimensionality of the concept of Indian aesthetics) are woven into these films’ ‘world cinemas’

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formal and stylistic visual template, their representation of locally specific storylines and their presentation of the POV of Indian characters who ordinarily occupy peripheral positions in Indian social, political, economic and cultural spheres. In their alternative and often radical socio-political standpoints, the Indian Indies resuscitate and render a visualized world of disempowered and marginalised subaltern protagonists – an antithesis of the glamourous and affluent hero and heroine archetypes of Bollywood. I will therefore foreground a more pluralistic, pragmatic and alternative paradigm in relation to Indian aesthetics by pointing towards new independent Indian cinema as an experimental, hybridised and postmodern assemblage where Indian aesthetics are an integral but not always explicitly obvious element in the globalised visual patchwork of the Indies’ overall aesthetic assembly. I identify this Indian component in the Indie films as an aesthetics of local realism – a presentation of the everyday aesthetic world from grassroots and marginal perspectives and lived experiences that exemplify broader entanglements with several specific discursive strands of the Indian socio-political matrix. Conceptual Framework: Local Realism and a Secular Gaze as New Indian Indie Aesthetics

A dominant paradigm adopted as an indigenous Indian framework to interpret culturally distinctive Bollywood films is rasa theory. Rasa (emotional states of ‘aesthetic pleasure’) – a ‘Hindu aesthetic theory’ (Lipner, 2017: 172) – has its provenance in the ancient Sanskrit religious treatise: the Nāṭya Śāstra. The rasa framework is premised on the evocation of emotions through visual imagery and performance and stipulates nine archetypical affective reactions into which visual representation could be compartmentalized. Rasa is useful on some interpretive levels in terms of framing an indigenous Bollywood industry that has ‘succeeded in “keeping out” Hollywood’ (Guneratne, 2003: 24). However, the restrictive rasa template promotes an essentialisation of emotions as the locus of Indian aesthetics whilst postcolonial interpretations have critiqued rasa theory as ‘a typical product of the Sanskritized elite of the Brahmin caste’ (Gomez, 2009: 105). Film scholars have deployed additional Hindu scriptural vocabulary and ritualistic analogies as the conceptual grid to understanding representation and reception of commercial Hindi cinema. Vijay Mishra (2013) refers to Indian cinema halls as ‘temples of desire’ with Bollywood stars personifying on-screen gods and goddesses worshipped by flocks of adoring acolytes. The idea of darshan or ‘worshipful gaze’ directed at the temple deity is therefore invoked as a synonym for a universalised Indian audience’s collective filmic

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gaze. Lutgendorf notes the synthesis between the idea of darshan and the visual composition of popular Indian cinema: The ideology and practice of darshan/nazar has contributed to a cinematic aesthetic of ‘frontality’ … the deity/actor, often centrally framed within a static tableau, was positioned to invite sustained eye contact with the viewer. But there is more to cinematic ‘seeing’ than this, since darshan is a ‘gaze’ that is returned. In a crowded Hindu temple, one can observe worshippers positioning themselves so that their eyes have a clear line of contact with those of the god. (Lutgendorf, 2006: 232–233) It could be argued that the postulates of rasa theory and the darshanic gaze whilst somewhat compatible with the thesis of an emic southern aesthetics also find provenance in Hindu theological doctrine and therefore in a contemporary Indian milieu susceptible to appropriation by the ‘high-caste’ Hindu majoritarian idea of ‘Indian-ness’ as being unilaterally Hindu. Additionally, the interpretation of Bollywood films and the Indian spectator as universally governed by emotional impulses and religious sensibilities promotes the perception of a decoupling from rationalism and realism. This skewed prioritisation of affect and religion retrenches the East-West binary positioning of the oriental object as incapable of logical, critical and rational reasoning due to being always-already subordinated by emotional and religious preconditioning. A unitary focus on emotion and religion also invokes the idea of the political realm being excluded or neglected by contemporary Indian cinema aesthetics. I will argue that affect, resistance and realist engagement with society and politics need not be mutually incompatible – to a significant degree, the new Indian Indies accomplish this synthesis. The Indies reclaim an aesthetics of realism and radical rationality through their politically interrogative disposition, and in this sense, they recall and reconstitute influential and politically aware previous Indian and Global South film movements by repurposing them for the 21st century. Several Indian Indies exhibit the radical impulses, approaches and experimental aesthetics of the Indian Parallel cinema movement of the 1970s and 1980s which in turn were inspired in significant measure by the Third Cinema manifesto proposed by Latin American filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (Guneratne, 2003: 21–22). This lineage of contemporary new independent Indian cinema has therefore spawned a multi-faceted aesthetic canvas in which distinctive Indian dimensions of locality, space, identity and culture are mediated through engagements with macro- and micro-level political discourses. Ultimately, I argue that this reclamation of realism as Indian aesthetics and a response to Bollywood’s mythologies and neoliberal fantasies is reconfigured

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paradoxically through the prism of globalisation and has manifested in a ‘Netflix-ready’ Indian aesthetics that incepts the local and regional in a potpourri of national and global entanglements. Rahul Riji Nair’s Malayalam film Kalla Nottam/The False Eye (2020) is an illustrative example of how experimental Indian Indie approaches destabilise the frontal tableau of Bollywood’s devotional darshanic gaze through a more subversive and secular local realist aesthetics. The entire film is narrated through the panoptic viewpoint of an all-seeing GoPro camera. This aesthetic experimentation is designed to capture local verisimilitude – a verité rendering of everyday events that are conjoined discursively with contemporary Indian society, culture and politics. The politics of gender, class and digital citizenship are rendered in the film through a ‘truthful’ telling of the unadorned aesthetics of interior private and exterior public spaces – ranging across the police station, the Indian kitchen and the family home. In this way, the reverential or worshipful gaze evangelised by Bollywood spectacle and stardom is supplanted by a subversive, apostatic, transgressive and secular gaze. This call for a more radical and political spectatorial position, which has often been underestimated or ignored by the rasa paradigm of passive, submissive emotional and metaphysical spectatorship, suggests a modern Indian Indie aesthetic experience that resembles the realism of postcolonial arthouse auteurs Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy and Ritwik Ghatak as well as the Parallel cinema directors of the 1970s and 1980s, including Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Girish Kasaravalli, Girish Karnad and Shyam Benegal. I will assert how the Indies’ unpredictably amorphous form and diverse aesthetic approaches are efficacious in their rendition of explicit political discourse that Bollywood circumvents by dint of its compositionally and commercially formulaic morphology and conservative ideological disposition. By extending the idea of an alternative Indian aesthetics from the ground-level local realist perspectives of invisibilised religious and ethnic minorities, oppressed caste groups and LGBTQ communities, I will position the ‘adulterated’ and ‘impure’ aesthetics, local realism and secular gaze of the Indian Indies as a mechanism to subvert and interrogate dominant socio-political and religious discourses. In the next demarcated sections, I will engage with the concept of an alternative Indian Indie aesthetics through readings of selected contemporary Indie films that interrogate a specific spectrum of socio-political themes and issues including patriarchy, caste discrimination, the Kashmir question and LGBTQ identity. Patriarchy and Politics of The Great Indian Kitchen

The portrayal of familial and domestic structures and spaces in commercial Hindi films and popular primetime Indian television series has often served as shorthand for another indigenous term – sanskari: virtuous observance of traditional orthodox Hindu religious customs, rituals and gendered roles.

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Idealised sanskari on-screen Indian families have undergirded the image of submissive and dutiful women who relent to every whim and fancy of the household’s men. This trope has often been normalized and reproduced by Bollywood and scrutinised and destabilised in new independent Indian films ranging from Island City (dir. Ruchika Oberoi, 2015) to Angry Indian Goddesses (dir. Pan Nalin, 2015). In the specific context of an aesthetics of local realism, The Great Indian Kitchen (dir. Jeo Baby, 2021) penetrates the ideological sanctum sanctorum of its titular space – a domain where the gendering of family roles, gastronomic customs, social and religious rituals are all churned together to produce a patriarchal and heteronormative prototype that to some extent is transposable across a pan-Indian terrain, albeit with regional nuances and local variances. Set in Kerala, this Malayalam film charts the arranged marriage of a young woman (Nimisha Sajayan) who subsequently falls into the daily routine of her newlywed life in her in-laws’ traditional home. Unnamed in the film, and appearing in the credits as the ‘Wife’, she carries out her everyday regimen. which largely involves confinement to the carceral archipelago of the kitchen, where she expends her waking hours cutting, slicing chopping, grinding, blending and cooking painstakingly crafted traditional dishes for the delectation of her husband and elderly father-in-law. By night, she serves as a depersonalised sexual receptacle to satisfy the peremptory carnal requirements of her husband. In its early stages, the primary role of the film’s aesthetics is to transport the viewer into the ubiquitous interior space of an archetypical traditional South Indian kitchen. A locally specific aesthetic frame is deployed to kindle in the viewer an awareness of the embeddedness of patriarchal practices in the family structure and also to experience visually a cloying ad nauseum repetition of mundane kitchen chores that become the all-consuming essence of the Wife’s existence. This sensorium of stagnation is simulated through recursive and rapidly edited multiangle closeup shots of the colourfully diverse ingredients, spices and kitchen minutiae that seem diametrically opposite to the drabness and drudgery of the woman’s situation. The editing rhythm mimics the splicing action of a knife, extending a montage of carrots, tomatoes and root vegetables being chopped, coconuts being split with a sickle and steam emanating from a pressure cooker – that sibilant staple of Indian kitchens. This mélange of audiovisual tropes capturing the rich regional culinary traditions also performs the function of evoking synesthetic senses of taste, aroma and feeling whilst commenting critically on how even the prosaic act of food preparation can be informed by ideology, patriarchal power and domination. Towards the later stages of the film, the stylistic traits of slow cinema are implemented, where longer camera takes and extended sequences linger on the wife’s tediously protracted and now predictable kitchen routine of cooking, cleaning and garbage disposal, all of which audience is invited to share – visually and vicariously.

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Incepted into this formal visual narration of the Wife’s largely solitary culinary incarceration is a specific depiction of the traditional gendering of space – the kitchen as the female cloister which male members of the household may ‘grace with their presence’ on fleeting and cursory occasions. The Wife’s husband only flits in briefly to patronise, reprimand or proposition his wife. The elderly father-in-law never enters this female space until a moment of crisis at the film’s climax forces him to cross the threshold. Despite the film’s setting in Kerala, an Indian state considered to be a progressive bastion of literacy, liberalism and female emancipation, the film’s aesthetic circuitry indicts duplicitous domestic male standards that hide behind the façade of a progressive outlook in the outside world. This is highlighted through contrast editing, where the husband, a schoolteacher, is depicted delivering a lecture on ‘family values’ to his adolescent all-female Sociology class which is counterpoised with shots of his slaving wife in the kitchen. This domestic double standard is captured by a popular adage in Kerala – ‘wear progressive slippers, but leave them at the doorstep’ (Pandey, 2021). This epigram is enacted visually in the film, where the Wife’s fatherin-law, the household patriarch, expects his wife to fetch his slippers and lay them at his feet before he slips them on and crosses the threshold into the outside world. Aesthetics culturally specific to gastronomic southern Indian practices act as the film’s leitmotif not only within but beyond the Indian kitchen. Also foregrounded visually are cultural traditions of communal consumption – the ubiquitous wedding banquet with meals served en masse on traditional plantain leaves, presenting an ethnographic insight for uninitiated viewers into local customs and practices. This rendition of local realism through detailed visual documentation of local social customs presents a granular optical index of regional cultural and culinary performativity. The camera adopts a fly-on-the-wall perspective, poised outside doorframes to capture the organic gender sifting as women congregate unconsciously in the hinterlands of the kitchen whilst men take up frontal positions in the verandah. This tacit almost instinctive spatial relegation of women to the nether regions of domestic environs is reflective of patriarchal codes and gendered practices in the outside world being replicated within the home space. The idea of the kitchen as a gendered space and a culinary cage is presented as a reproducible and transposable template applicable to several women in Indian domestic circumstances. In one sequence, the film’s husband and Wife are invited to the home of another young married couple and their son and daughter. Before the guests arrive, the camera captures the woman of the house akin to her soon-to-arrive counterpart, enclosed in the kitchen. The woman is framed within the fortified contours of the kitchen – a literal grid metal mesh with locks and bolts. The reproducibility of the

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spatial ideologies of the ‘great Indian kitchen’ is made explicit here. However, the film is careful not to essay an essentialised or universalised one-size-fitsall representation of domestic patriarchy. Another sequence features the Wife’s mobile phone conversation with her young female classical dancer friend who is waited upon by her husband, and when the woman indicates to her husband that he has not been cooking meat for the last four days, he promises to cook a delicious dish of beef for her. This ‘turning of the tables’ depiction of an uxorious husband’s role reversal is positioned to assert that gender equality and equitable domestic roles are not unprecedented, especially amongst India’s younger generation. This is also one of two defiant political references in the film to the open consumption of beef, even by Hindus, in the state. Kerala, governed by a left-wing coalition, is one of the last outlying bastions of beef-eating, compared to BJP-ruled Indian states where cow slaughter and beef consumption are proscribed, and several Muslim cattle farmers have died at the hands of vigilante Hindu fundamentalist lynch mobs. Meanwhile, back in the family home, whilst her older husband – the household patriarch – browses social media on his mobile phone, his elderly wife covers the cleaning duties of the newlywed Wife, who returns home after the aforementioned dinner visit. After completing her exacting tasks, the mother-in-law finally leaves the kitchen for the night, switching off the light and leaving the audience to ponder on the pregnant emptiness of the dark frame. This sequence is akin to another new independent Indian film Court (dir. Chaitanya Tamhane, 2015), where the bureaucratic daily proceedings of a local court have been completed. An orderly proceeds to switch the lights off incrementally in the courtroom, and the camera remains fixed on the black frame. This invocation of stillness recalls the Japanese Zen philosophical concept of mu – nothingness, emptiness or stillness, which is redolent in the lingering unpopulated domestic interior shots of Yasujiro Ozu’s films – a ‘radical emptiness’ (Davis, 2018: 40). In some measure, the contemplation of specific spatial interiors is a cinematic technique not only to facilitate mu, but in the case of the two Indian Indie films, to insert a caesura for the spectator to consider the role of space – kitchen and court, both of which are replete with ideological and political meaning. Whilst the women toil in the kitchen, the younger husband engages in yoga – Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s favourite pastime. Inventive overhead shots of food cooking are intercut with the husband’s yogic postures and the father-in-law lounging indolently in the verandah reading the newspaper whilst the two wives continue their kitchen-bound exertions. The threshold is an important coordinate in Hindu religious households. It is the border that the new wife has to enter with her right foot first. In the film, the camera is often positioned at doorways, and strategically sideways, to gain a lateral rather than frontal view of the verandah. This clever

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demarcation of boundaries between internal and external spaces is a distinctive trope to indicate spatial gendering. This microcosmic example of spatial segregation on the basis of gender roles prefigures the film’s punctuating politico-religious moment – the landmark true-life Supreme Court ruling permitting women of menstruating age to enter the sacred Hindu Sabrimala shrine, thus far the exclusive domain of male pilgrims. According to an orthodox Hindu practice, a menstruating woman is considered unclean and impure and has to be quarantined for the duration of her menstrual cycle. In this context, the Wife suffers a form of untouchability akin to caste-based segregation in her husband’s home, where she is confined to her room and made to sleep on the floor. Interior and exterior socio-political discourses converge in the form of television news reports featured in the diegetic film frame. Similar to media commentary on the Supreme Court verdict on the anti-homosexuality legislation Section 377 in Evening Shadows (which will be discussed later on) in The Great Indian Kitchen, the Wife is galvanized into an act of resistance after watching news reports and citizen journalist videos on the Sabrimala shrine Supreme Court ruling. The Wife shares a Facebook video post of a local female activist hailing the Supreme Court order as a general declaration of freedom for Indian women. The activist’s speech subsequently incurs the wrath of a right-wing gang of local men whose reprisal for what they deem a ‘feminist’ act involves breaking into the activist’s home and setting fire to the activist’s scooter. Ultimately, after being threatened by her husband to delete her shared post, the Wife herself decides to brave potential misogynistic violence. In a dramatic moment captured in slow motion, the Wife flings a bucket of filthy drain water over her husband and father-in-law, departing from her domestic prison to pursue her repressed dream of teaching Indian classical dance to female pupils. This revolutionary act of female empowerment is aesthetically embellished through an actual dance performance to the tune of a radically lyricised song – a filmic set piece antithetical to the sexual objectification of Bollywood’s song and dance sequences. This act of performative female agency and expression is filmed in the Sri Gujarati Vidyalaya Higher Secondary School auditorium in Kozhikode, Kerala. The school’s title is emblazoned in the background of the visual frame and could be interpreted as a coded political riposte in aesthetic form; considering the nation’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, prides himself on his Gujarati heritage. Local Aesthetics of Caste in Life of an Outcast

Life of an Outcast (dir. Pawan K Shrivastava, 2018) bears distinctive aesthetic similarities to another independent Indian film, Gurvinder Singh’s diegetically austere Andhe Ghore Da Daan/Alms for a Blind Horse (2011)

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which is a slow cinema meditation on the crippling stasis that presides over the eked-out daily existence of an impoverished Dalit Sikh farming family in rural Punjab. Singh’s film’s premise seems a prefiguration of the mass mobilisation of farmers in New Delhi in 2021 in vociferous protest against the Modi government’s indiscriminate plan to corporatise the agrarian sector. Andhe Ghore Da Daan is itself a throwback to the Parallel cinema oeuvre of formalist auteur Mani Kaul, who was also Singh’s filmmaking mentor. The aesthetic inheritance is therefore evident in these examples of intersections between earlier Parallel cinema and the new Indian Indies. Life of an Outcast is set in rural Uttar Pradesh, a northern Indian state currently under the autocratic rule of militant Hindu monk turned BJP politician and state chief minister Yogi Adityanath. Local realism is represented in the rudimentary lifestyle of an indigent ‘lower-caste’ Dalit family in the film, whose spartan domestic surroundings are emphasised by the encompassing sparseness of the arid region in which they reside. The film’s first aesthetic exposition is a political epigraph stating the ‘Film is dedicated to all proletariats [sic] of the world and the people working against the Caste system’. A wide-angle shot communicates the barren stillness of the topography; the film’s unnamed Dalit fisherman protagonist immersed knee-deep in a placid lake whilst faintly audible in the diegetic background a chorus of village schoolchildren’s voices intone the Indian national anthem. The song’s lyrics and tune are detectable only to the initiated Indian ear and therefore act as a specific yet strategically important filmic device. The ‘Indian-ness’ of the land is thus established through this acousmatic aural flag, as is the ideology of nationalism, which will eventually disenfranchise further the film’s already precarious and beleaguered Dalit protagonists – the fisherman, his wife and their village schoolteacher son. The latter is wrongfully accused by the ‘higher-caste’ school owner of teaching against the ideals of the Hindu holy epic, the Ramayana, and thrown into the local police station cell. This scenario of arbitrary police arrest of Dalit individuals on spurious charges is mirrored in other Indie films – Court, where an elderly Dalit activist is accused of singing seditionary songs; and in the Tamil film Visaranai (dir. Vetrimaaran, 2015), where a group of Dalit migrant workers are arrested on fabricated charges and tortured in a police station. The commitment to presenting granular levels of local life in Life of an Outcast is rendered in the form of rural aesthetics reminiscent of Mani Kaul’s film approach, but also aligns with Parallel cinema stalwart Shyam Benegal’s caste-themed and rural-set Manthan/The Churning (1976), which Benegal crowdfunded with the input of 500,000 dairy farmers in Gujarat. The crowdfunded and caste-oriented composition of Life of an Outcast therefore is another throwback to earlier arthouse Indian cinema. The film’s visual and thematic evocation of social injustice in the rural Indian sphere also incites

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comparisons with Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953) and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), although the director, Pawan K. Shrivastava, favours a desaturated colour scheme to reflect the enervated and disenchanted daily life of the Dalit fisherman and his family. The film’s depiction of abject rural subalterns dispossessed from any claim to the land on which they labour invites global intertextual comparisons with the spartan rural ‘aesthetics of hunger’ proposed by Brazilian Cinema Novo director Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964) and the Third Cinema qualities of Djibril Diop Mambety’s Hyenas (1992). The sensorial experience of crippling poverty is successfully communicated to the viewer through extended long takes punctuated with silence – the silence of the subaltern. Editing is deployed to contrast the confining experiences of father and son. The father is free conceptually but nevertheless in ‘captivity’ in terms of his shackling socio-economic situation and the insurmountable obstacles as he attempts to collect bail money to liberate his son. The son is incarcerated in the police station – a site notorious in India as a space of exception (Devasundaram, 2018) where paradoxically the rule of law is suspended and minority demographics routinely tortured, detained arbitrarily and often murdered in these carceral archipelagos. Life of an Outcast weaves a strong contemporary political thread through its tapestry of minimalist and threadbare provincial existence, through the medium of the village tea seller – a ‘chaiwallah’ whose incessant nationalistic, casteist and misogynistic diatribe and ideological proclivities frame this on-screen character as a caricature of Narendra Modi, who routinely brandishes his own transition from humble chaiwallah to prime minister. The village tea shop’s ‘mini Modi’ becomes a mouthpiece for the film to present a précis of the populist politics that has become the dominant metanarrative in contemporary BJP-ruled India. The tea seller is versatile in his tirades; lambasting China, ‘beef-eating lower-castes’ and young women who wear jeans whilst lamenting the destruction of Indian morals, traditions and culture, extolling Narendra Modi, Modi’s yoga positions and closeness to Donald Trump. In essence, the village tea seller’s discourse is rhetorical shorthand for the reified reactionary enactments of state policy under the BJP in Uttar Pradesh state and in India on a national level. The large scale irony is the visibly impoverished state of this small scale Modi facsimile – the tea seller’s tattered and torn garments testify to the gross incongruity between his grandiose claims and the reality of his own squalor. The film’s rural aesthetics include the trope of the ‘village idiot’ – an outlandishly attired young man with an incongruously rakish flat cap who mutely whiles away the day’s hours in front of the village tea shack playing a board game. This inarticulate simpleton who embodies both captive audience and silent recipient of the tea seller’s rhetoric and invective is an aesthetic figuration of an opiated Indian electorate – the body politic of the

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Indian nation that installed the BJP in power in the first place. The eccentric character seems content to keep his head down, consumed by his solipsistic and inconsequential game. This could be interpreted as a reference to a radio speech by Narendra Modi, where he juxtaposed cross-border tensions between India and China with an exhortation to Indian entrepreneurs to manufacture and popularise traditional Indian board games (News18.com, 2020). In terms of costume design, the motley and variegated clothes worn by the silent board-game player is a sartorial symbol of India’s own polytheistic, multiethnic and polyglot composition – the delicate fabric of intricately woven multiplicities – now a frayed, fragile, endangered and increasingly nominal secular, constitutional and democratic republic. The eccentric villager’s silence seems symbolic of the complicity of civil society in the nation’s unassailable march towards theocracy, nationalism and authoritarianism. However, the narrative orchestrates a rupturing of this submissive silence at the film’s denouement, when the mute and mysterious personification of the Indian public stands up and exclaims suddenly, ‘I lost again. I will try again tomorrow’, leaving the tea seller flummoxed at this unexpected vocalisation. This revelatory breaking of silence is in stark contrast to the exchange just a few moments ago between the tea seller and the Dalit fisherman, who remains strictly silent in the face of the tea seller’s interminable monologue. The tea seller’s parting query to the nameless fisherman ‘will you come tomorrow?’ remains unanswered by the subaltern Dalit, who departs silently on his bicycle into the gathering twilight gloom. The father’s despondent bicycling journey back home is disrupted by editing interruptions – abrupt insertions of monochrome flashback sequences into the narrative, mirroring the uncertainties that seem to be the only predictable facet of the anonymous life of the Dalit outcast. These flashback shots punch through the raucous drone of the devotional Hindu bhajans blaring unceasingly from the loudspeaker of the nearby village temple. Editing therefore orchestrates an audiovisual interruption of hegemonic religious dogma with a throwback to the realities of the futureless and dispossessed young Dalit schoolteacher son who realises that his services as a maths teacher are redundant. His affirmation of identity at the start of the film – ‘I am a mathematics teacher, not a priest’ – is counterpoised with his enunciation of resistance in the final flashback interjections – ‘the question of caste is more complicated than equations of mathematics’. The schoolteacher’s assertions testify to the film’s own presentation of rationality and realism to contest caste discrimination and religious ethnocentrism, which constitute the grand narrative in modern India. The religious soundtrack, akin to the temple’s loudspeaker bhajans, to which the national narrative has been ideologically rewired, is interrogated even further in the black and white analepsis where the fisherman’s wife asks their son, ‘why don’t you go to a big city like Delhi?’ The schoolteacher son’s rejoinder to his mother sums up the

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intergenerational inevitability of this family of rural Dalit outcasts – ‘You too left the village, didn’t you? But what happened?’ The answer to the son’s query can be located intertextually at the climax of another independent Indian film, Peepli Live (dir. Anusha Rizvi, 2010). The film’s coda features a Dalit farmer, Natha Das Manikpuri, whose flight from the poverty-ridden village of Peepli to the big city ends up in his indentured labour in a high-rise building construction site. That particular aesthetic frame presents a haunting image of the reality of India’s economic property boom – Natha covered in cement and concrete detritus – a pale and despondent spectre of India’s neoliberal grand design. Therefore, whilst Bollywood may constitute an escapist and pleasure-based cinema of interruptions (Gopalan, 2002) that breaks rational and realist narrative continuity in favour of mostly uncontextualized insertions of romantic, action-based or sexualized song and dance interludes, the caesuras in Life of an Outcast stand apart in their political function and are more attuned to the Third Cinema manifesto’s thrust towards destabilising passive viewership through jolting and jarring reminders of the predicament of subaltern subjects. Exemplifying the blending of local realism with socio-political commentary, one sequence set in front of the village tea stall sees buffalos marching across the foreground of the frame, acting as a bovine screen wipe strategy. In their wake, a sleek and flashy car glides incongruously by, illustrating the discontinuities in neoliberal India’s developmental design. The ostensibly mundane ritual of vehicles waiting at rural level crossings for trains to pass – a quintessentially Indian snapshot – is captured with painstaking exactitude in real time, evoking a sense of the local but also foretelling the state of suspension, repetition and liminality that constitutes the permanent lived experience of the Dalit father in the film. A parallel could be drawn with Arundhati Roy’s vivid description in her novel The God of Small Things (2002) of a similar vigil beside a railway crossing in rural Kerala where a middle-class family ensconced in their car find themselves surrounded by a political rally led by Dalits. The idea that the new Indies undertake a 21st century reboot of previous Parallel cinema is reinforced when two male village cyclists drift by the tea stall engaged in conversation around one of the men’s optimistic assertion that he has sent ‘Facebook requests to fifty girls’. This digital connectedness – the drives, desires and imperatives built around social media captured in the film’s aesthetic frame – exemplifies the transformed globalised zeitgeist that delineates the local realism of the new Indies from their Parallel cinema forebears. Kashmir Question: Local and Secular Aesthetics in Hamid

The abrogation on 5 August 2019 of special status for the trouble-torn region of Kashmir through revocation of the Indian constitution’s Article 370 is a key political ploy in the BJP regime’s approach to achieving a Hindu Rashtra

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(Hindu nation). On a cinematic level, Bollywood films such as Mission Kashmir (dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2000), Fanaa (dir. Kunal Kohli, 2006) and more recently, Uri: The Surgical Strike (dir. Aditya Dhar, 2019) typify Bollywood’s upholding of a nationalist narrative. Aesthetically and thematically interrogative filmic appraisals of the Kashmir question are emerging from the new Indian Indie space. In relation to a regional aesthetic, Indie films such as Harud (dir. Aamir Bashir), Side A and Side B (dir. Rahat Kazmi, 2018) and No Fathers in Kashmir (dir. Ashvin Kumar, 2019) harness location-filming, local actors and a minimalist realist sensibility to punctuate the filmic frame, presenting a picture of grassroots Kashmiri protagonists’ lived experience. Hamid (Aijaz Khan, 2018) is a potent visual chronicle of the dehumanising effects of conflict on both sides of the battleline. The film’s unusual premise imagines the unlikely friendship forged over a mobile phone between an eight-year old Kashmiri boy, whose father has been forcibly disappeared by occupying Indian military forces, and an Indian army soldier suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Hamid randomly dials an auspicious number in his desire to call god and petition for the return of his father. Hamid’s call reaches the Indian soldier, and presuming he is speaking with ‘Allah’, Hamid asks ‘Allah’ to return Hamid’s missing father. Bollywood has tended to exploit Kashmir’s pristine natural beauty as an exotic backdrop rather than investing in any meaningful or substantial engagement with the lives of Kashmiri citizens. The Bollywood aesthetic has binarised Kashmir as either a beautiful blank canvas or turbulent terrorist zone. The connection between the land and its inhabitants, social, cultural, religious and political histories that constitute this complex discursive constellation are largely erased from the aesthetic and narrative frame of commercial Hindi cinema’s cliché of Kashmir. In Hamid, the ubiquity of the languidly sublime expanse of the iconic Dal Lake is evoked to highlight the young lad’s connection to the landscape, illustrating the local livelihoods that are contingent on the lake – the boatbuilders and houseboats that dot the lake and are reliant on the region’s moribund tourist industry. Hamid himself seeks solace in completing with the assistance of local boatbuilders the construction of his father’s unfinished boat. Casting of local actors plays a prominent role in enhancing the verisimilitude of the film’s aesthetic. The arduous auditioning process to cast the film’s eponymous central character resulted in the discovery of local Kashmiri Talha Arshad Reshi, whose striking debut central performance earned him a National Film Award (WION, 2019). The authentically local aesthetic is accompanied by the film’s secular gaze, which is a marked departure from the jingoistic tone of Bollywood blockbusters that position Indian soldiers as saviours of local Muslim Kashmiris, who are invariably prone to radicalisation, militancy and terrorism. The

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secular tone in Hamid wields the boy’s childlike faith in the infallibility of a higher power to illustrate the eventual irony that human empathy, compassion, dialogue, tolerance, ethical and moral consciousness constitute more real, present and potent catalysts to resolving violent conflict than the ultimately uni-directional worshipful gaze of human supplicants which is not reciprocated by the beneficence of any presiding deity or supreme being. Humour is also interspersed in the narrative when Hamid discloses to his mother that ‘Allah is beautiful, is a really good singer and can play the guitar.’ In a moment of aesthetic political self-reflexivity, Hamid and his young peers are shepherded by an adult recruiter into watching a violent jihadi propaganda film. Unconvinced by the radicalising film’s exhortation to kill, Hamid comments to a fellow young viewer that the message of the film is wrong because ‘Allah’, in reality, does not sound like the film’s voiceover narrator. The film’s even-handed treatment of its aesthetic world presents the lived experiences of participants on opposing sides of the conflict, reminiscent of the representation of the French occupation of Algiers in The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) but without the explicit violence of the latter film. In this context, the mise-en-scène in Hamid includes the interiors of the Indian soldiers’ living quarters and also the POV of a security battalion through tight framing from the claustrophobic interiors of their securitised armoured vehicle. This equitable mode of aesthetic representation is aided by contrast editing cuts that transport the viewer across a range of spatial perspectives and contexts – local Kashmiri and occupying Indian paramilitary. Political elements of local realism punctuate the screen in relation to the interpolation of actual street marches by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) – a community group comprising survivors whose fathers, sons, husbands and brothers have been forcibly disappeared by Indian security forces in Kashmir. Authentic APDP street rallies have featured in several other Indian Indie films set in Kashmir, such as Harud. In relation to a point raised at the start of this chapter, regarding the emotion-centric focus of rasa theory, Indie films such as Hamid often blend emotion, realism and resistance in their visual frames. Affect is dealt with candidly and explicitly in a sequence where Hamid’s mother, unable to countenance the mute image of her husband amongst a collage of faces of disappeared men on an APDP placard, breaks down and sobs uncontrollably. She is chided gently by other vigil keepers who tell her ‘you cannot cry here’ because an outpouring of emotion could have a cascading effect on the APDP gathering’s pent-up collective grief. The poignancy of the sequence is accompanied by the strains of local Kashmiri folk music. In the subsequent scene, Hamid, after a Damascene moment, realises the Indian soldier is not Allah and Hamid’s father is dead. The boy gives vent to a floodgate of tears, crying out to the open skies and asking Allah why his father was taken away.

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Comparison could be drawn with similar Indies, notably Ashvin Kumar’s No Fathers in Kashmir (2019), which paint a nuanced portrait of daily local Kashmiri life that is nonetheless enmeshed in a national and global discursive network. Kumar’s film features a young local Kashmiri boy who becomes infatuated with a visiting British Kashmiri teenager – two young people drawn together by the common status of their forcibly ‘disappeared’ fathers. Kumar’s political documentary filmmaking antecedents (Inshallah, Football and Inshallah, Kashmir) influence the aesthetics of this fictional feature film, lending credence to the idea of local realism as an aesthetic strategy to capture the lived realities of oppressed and powerless subaltern subjects. Similar to the local sensibilities captured aesthetically in Hamid and Life of an Outcast, No Fathers in Kashmir pays meticulous attention to authenticity in relation to costume design, particularly the research that informed the draping of characters in traditional Kashmiri shawls. The film’s costume designer, Ritu Kumar, reveals the background behind this specific thread in the film’s visual tapestry: The best jamawar shawls were actually produced in the 17th and 18th century and later on they were copied by the British in the 19th century. I wanted to use the original ones, so I went to the Victoria and Albert museum in London, to the Benaras Hindu University that has a big collection and the National Museum in Delhi. I sent them a letter stating what I needed and that it had to be authentic, I cannot use copies of the original shawls. Kani shawls used to be worn by the men and women like blankets, they were huge and they would wrap themselves completely in it. People didn’t know knitting and there were no sweaters in Kashmir, they knew weaving. Kani shawls used to be hand-woven with almost 80 colours. … In the film, you actually get to see the aesthetics of what Kashmir was all about. (Kumar, 2019) These interweaving layers of film aesthetics and Kashmiri cultural history through sartorial strategies are an example of the nuance and contextualisation – local aesthetics communicated through naturalistic representation in the aforementioned Indian Indie films. The realistic denouement in Hamid circumvents any predictable redemptive closure – usually the norm in mainstream Bollywood films. Instead, the reality of retrenched battlelines between the Indian security apparatus and the local Kashmiris is foregrounded when the film’s artifice – Hamid’s misconception of the soldier as Allah – is dismantled. A distraught Hamid reacts to the revelation of the soldier’s true identity by querying ‘are you my enemy?’ and receives the honest unembellished answer: ‘yes’. A sense of human connection does however inform the film’s epilogue. Tins of red paint Hamid has

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yearned for to varnish his father’s boat arrive as an unexpected parcel in the post. Hamid identifies this as a gift from ‘Allah’, leaving the film with an open sense of optimism rather than definitive resolution. The film’s juxtaposition of affect and political awareness could be conflated with Julio Garcia Espinosa’s (1979) desire for an imperfect cinema: Perhaps the cognitive power of art is like the power of a game for a child. Perhaps aesthetic pleasure lies in sensing the functionality (without a specific goal) of our intelligence and our own sensitivity. Art can stimulate, in general, the creative function of man. It can function as constant stimulus toward adopting an attitude of change with regard to life. (Espinosa, 1979) The film’s final moments picture Hamid and his mother ensconced in his resplendent red boat, which he rows down the Dal Lake. The strategically symbolic rubescent hue alludes to the boat as being born out of blood, at the personal level of Hamid’s murdered father and at a national level the inordinate bloodshed that has transpired since the advent of the conflict in Kashmir. This is another indication of how local realism is blended into affective aesthetic strategies and narratives of political resistance in new independent Indian films in a distinct detour from Bollywood’s more predictable aesthetic code. LGBTQ Identity, Local Realism and National Discourse: Coming Out of Evening Shadows

Independent filmmaker Sridhar Rangayan has been at the vanguard of LGBTQ activism and awareness through an extensive corpus of low-budget films made under the aegis of his production company, Solaris Pictures, which specialises in LGBTQ film content. His film Evening Shadows (2018) draws on the local aesthetics of a small town in Rangayan’s native state of Karnataka in South India to illustrate the film’s coming out narrative whilst challenging retrenched heteronormative, homophobic and orthodox religious attitudes towards sexual orientation and identity in traditional domestic structures. The film’s narrative is positioned strategically in terms of its temporal setting on the cusp of the Indian Supreme Court’s verdict in 2013 upholding an antiquated British colonial-era anti-homosexuality legislation – Section 377. As the film’s postscript reveals prior to the end credits, Section 377 was later abolished in a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court in 2018. Similar to the other independent films mentioned in this essay, Evening Shadows is an independent low-budget film that was created through a combination of crowdfunding, self-investment and private investor

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contributions. The film has since gained global visibility through screenings at the UK Asian Film Festival (UKAFF 2019) and accessibility on Netflix. The film charts the homecoming of Kartik (Devansh Doshi) a young gay man who keeps his sexuality hidden from his traditional Brahmin Hindu mother, Vasudha (Mona Ambegaonkar), and father, Damodar, played by veteran Indian actor Ananth Mahadevan whom several Indian viewers associate with serials on the solitary national television channel Doordarshan during the 1980s. Unbeknownst to Kartik, who works as a photographer and lives with his partner in Mumbai, his misogynistic and disciplinarian father plans to exploit Kartik’s visit to coerce him to ‘settle down’ through an enforced arranged marriage. Brahmanical rituals punctuate the aesthetic and narrative chain of the film; a religious undercurrent akin to the devotional songs blaring from the temple loudspeaker in Life of an Outcast and the religious ceremonies that are hard-coded into the everyday workings of the household in The Great Indian Kitchen. Religious rituals and the pooja ceremony form a filmic motif for the traditional Indian Hindu family. This visual suffusion of worshipful and devotional darshanic supplications symbolises the standardisation of Hindu religious observance and heteronormativity as the ‘Indian way’. Unlike Bollywood films that uphold this dominant ideology, Sridhar Rangayan’s film antagonises it. Kartik’s return to the ancestral home and his disruptive act of coming out punctures the linearity and hegemony of the patriarchal, orthodox Hindu heteronormative national narrative. Filming on location around Mysore in locations such as the Balmuri Falls, Srirangapatna and an ancient archaeological temple site in Talkad beside the Cauvery River provides a naturalistic aesthetic backdrop for the film’s central theme of a gay man challenging archaic attitudes steeped in religious orthodoxy. In a pivotal plot point, Kartik and his mother depart on a day trip to the aforementioned Talkad temple. Vasudha has been ‘allowed’ to leave her daily domestic duties on the directive of her husband to utilise the excursion to urge Kartik to get married. During their perambulations around the ancient temple, Vasudha narrates the folk legend of the ‘curse of Talkad’ and how it is prophesied that Talkad would turn into a desert, the river Malangi would transform into a whirlpool and the kings of Mysore would never have a male heir. This incorporation of a local myth into the film’s narrative is aestheticised by positioning the ancient temple and river in the background of the frame as Vasudha narrates the legend to Kartik. This interaction also serves as symbolic prefiguration of the fact that Kartik will not produce the male progeny his parents demand of him. The buried temples in the myth relate to the secrets interred in Kartik’s mind. If Hamid rows his mother across Kashmir’s Dal lake, Kartik performs a similar act, on this occasion, in a coracle on the Cauvery River. The two local landscapes are distinctly different as are the specific contexts, but a sense of

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solidarity is forged through the aesthetic constellation in both films. Kartik hands over the oar to his reluctant mother, encouraging her symbolically and imploring her verbally to break free from her lifetime of domestic and patriarchal confinement – a disenthrallment that is accomplished by the Wife in The Great Indian Kitchen. The titular evening shadows are captured evocatively in a wide establishing shot of the coracle on the picturesque river and closeup shots of mother and son, whose faces become canvases for the fading twilight, setting the stage for Kartik to step out of the shadows and affirm his true identity. Affect is injected into the frame following Kartik’s coming out statement to his mother, when renowned classical Indian singer Shubha Mudgal’s plangent and earthy extra-diegetic voice pierces the visual aesthetic of evening shadows, as the camera soars over the water and the silhouetted figures of the stricken mother and subdued son. On a political level, the film deploys aesthetic references to the impending Supreme Court judgement on Section 377 through television news reports and Kartik’s partner,, Aman (Arpit Chaudhary), constantly reminding Kartik about the importance of the verdict. This forms the broader discursive political backdrop to the domestic sword of Damocles hanging over Kartik’s head in the form of forced arranged marriage. The borders of interior and exterior, macro-level public and micro-level private discourse are blurred. There is a similar interplay between local and national, domestic interiority and political exteriority mediated in The Great Indian Kitchen in the film’s integration of another monumental Supreme Court ruling permitting women of menstruating age to enter the Sabrimala shrine in Kerala. Evening Shadows casts a critical and secularising gaze through an aesthetic frame that captures simultaneously the elaborate minutiae of Brahmanical religious rituals whilst destabilising the worshipful gaze through editing-induced counterpoints. This involves specific set-pieces and dialogic rational deconstructions that attenuate overarching metanarratives of superstitious belief and blind religious faith. Especially relevant is a sequence framed as a Socratic duel between Kartik and his mother, where Kartik draws on rational reasoning to explain the normality of his sexual identity and question his mother’s subordination to metaphysical tenets, social norms and doctrinaire scriptural precepts. Rendered with honesty and authenticity, Kartik relies on rational discourse, convincingly setting out a scientific case for gay identity thereby dispelling his mother’s myths, superstitions and clichés. Affective elements are synthesised with this rational discourse, when Vasudha is pictured in a traditional kitchen analogous to the culinary cloister of the Wife in The Great Indian Kitchen. When Vasudha sees her son in the kitchen, an emotional flashback takes her back to when Kartik, as a little boy, would commune with her in the kitchen, much to Kartik’s father’s disgust and consternation. Jolted back to the present, Vasudha evicts a bewildered Kartik

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from the kitchen, because she holds the kitchen’s innate ‘femininity’ responsible for his ‘unconventional’ sexual identity, attesting to the power of religio-patriarchal ideology and the gendering of domestic space. In another specifically aesthetic exposition of how religious rituals are wielded as a tool of discrimination, stigmatisation and segregation, on discovering Kartik is gay, his incensed father performs Brahmanical funeral rites as a symbolic disowning of his gay son. This elaborate ritual designed to purge the existence of his ‘unclean’ son is captured by a range of camera angles. This sequence resembles the ceremony performed by the father and son in The Great Indian Kitchen whilst the ‘impure’ menstruating Wife is confined to her room. In Evening Shadows, the authoritarian father’s darshanic gaze is interrupted by his wife, Vasudha’s act of defiance. Stopping Damodar in mid-flow, Vasudha launches an excoriating and emotional challenge to her husband, daring him to try to perform the funeral rites for their living son. Reclaiming her son, Vasudha orchestrates a domestic revolution, pronouncing her unconditional acceptance of Kartik, thereby contesting successfully the patriarchal and religious order and reinstating her son’s position in the family home despite his father’s continued refusal to acknowledge Kartik’s existence. Affect and realism combine with a secularising gaze in this showdown between the traditional Brahman wife and husband. This filmic overturning of patriarchal power is a radical overhaul of Bollywood’s hegemonic heteronormative and sanskari ideologies and illustrates how a juxtaposition of emotional drama and verisimilitude is fashioned in a hybrid aesthetic frame through the local perspectives and point of view of ordinary and marginalised characters in the aforementioned Indian Indie films. Conclusion

The corpus of films presented in this essay reflects the central argument of a more critical and politically attuned Indian film aesthetics that adopts local realism and a secularising rather than a worshipful gaze to address a range of exigent and topical themes from the viewpoint of dispossessed, disempowered and marginalised protagonists. The points raised illustrate how the religiosity and nationalism that undergird Bollywood’s ideological and aesthetic framework are countered by the Indies’ more hybridised synthesis of local, national and international visual strategies, reiterating the thesis that the emotion-centric and religion-inflected basis of rasa theory need not constitute an absolute or originary locus for aesthetic analysis of modern Indian cinema. The assemblage of aesthetics of affect, rationalism, reality and resistance achieved through the lens of local realism and a secular gaze in new independent Indian cinema bears hallmarks of preceding Indian film movements and radical forms of Third Cinema. A passage from the Third Cinema

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manifesto is apt here and bears fresh relevance in relation to the contemporary independent Indian films analysed in this essay: It is hardly necessary to point out that those films which achieve an intelligent use of the possibilities of the image, adequate dosage of concepts, language and structure that flow naturally from each theme, and counterpoints of audio-visual narration achieve effective results in the politicisation and mobilisation of cadres and even in work with the masses, where this is possible. (Solanas & Getino, 1970: 5)

References Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ayyub, R. (2019). Bollywood and the politics of hate. [online] Aljazeera.com. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/5/12/bollywood-and-thepolitics-of-hate [Accessed 15 November 2020]. Bhaskar, I. and R. Allen. (2009). Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema. India: Tulika Books. Davis, D. (2018). ‘Ozu, the Ineffable’, in Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence, Choi, J. (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 33–44. Devasundaram, A. (2016a). ‘Bollywood’s soft power: branding the nation, sustaining a meta-hegemony’, in Soft Power, Film Culture and the BRICS, Cooke, P. (Ed.), New Cinemas Journal of Contemporary Film, Intellect, 14(1), 51–70. ———. (2016b). India’s New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid. New York: Routledge Advances in Film Studies. ———. (2018). Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Indian Cinema Revolution. New York: Routledge. Dwyer, R. (2006). Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. New York: Routledge. Espinosa, J. (1979). For an imperfect cinema by Julio García Espinosa, trans. by Julianne Burton. [online] Ejumpcut.org. Available at: https://www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/ImperfectCinema.html [Accessed 15 March 2020]. Gomez, F. R. (2009). ‘The Rasa Theory: A Challenge for Intercultural Aesthetics’, in Van den Braembussche, A. et al. (eds.), Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective, Springer. pp 105–117. Gopalan, L. (2002). Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: BFI Publishing. Guneratne, A. (2003). ‘Introduction’, in Guneratne, A. and Dissanayake, W. (eds.), Rethinking Third Cinema. New York: Routledge. pp. 1–28. Kumar, R. (2019). Ritu Kumar on designing the costumes for No Fathers in Kashmir. [online] Telegraphindia.com. Available at: https://www.telegraphindia.com/ entertainment/ritu-kumar-on-designing-the-costumes-for-no-fathers-in-kashmir/ cid/1689342 [Accessed 3 February 2021].

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Kumar, S. (2013). Constructing the nation’s enemy: Hindutva, popular culture and the muslim ‘other’ in bollywood cinema, Third World Quarterly, 34(3), pp. 458–469. Lipner, J. (2017). Hindu Images and their Worship with Special Reference to Vaisnavism: Philosophical-Theological Inquiry, Oxon: Routledge. Lutgendorf, P. (2006). Is there an Indian way of filmmaking? International Journal of Hindu Studies, 10(3), pp. 227–256. Mishra, V. (2013). Bollywood Cinema. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. News18.com. (2020). PM Modi Appeals Start-ups to Revamp Desi Board Games to Promote Staying Indoors during Covid-19. [online] Available at: https://www. news18.com/news/buzz/pm-modi-appeals-start-ups-to-revamp-desi-board-gamesto-promote-staying-indoors-during-covid-19-2691111.html [Accessed 9 January 2021]. Pandey, G. (2021). The Great Indian Kitchen: Serving an Unsavoury Tale of Sexism in Home. [online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india55919305 [Accessed 21 February 2021]. Pugsley, P. (2016). Tradition, Culture and Aesthetics in Contemporary Asian Cinema. New York: Routledge. Roy, A. (2002). The God of Small Things, New Delhi: Penguin Books India. Solanas, F. and O. Getino. (1970). Toward a Third Cinema. Cinéaste, 4(3), pp. 1–10. WION. (2019). Child actor Talha wins National Award for ‘Hamid’, director says can’t tell him as phone lines jammed in Kashmir. [online] Available at: https:// www.wionews.com/entertainment/child-actor-talha-wins-national-award-for-hamiddirector-says-cant-connect-as-phone-lines-jammed-in-kashmir-242578 [Accessed 1 March 2021].

6 INDIAN GANGSTERS, AMERICAN NOIR AND AFRICA’S DRUM MAGAZINE The Making of a South African Gangster Fliek during Early Apartheid Damon Heatlie

South Africa’s Al Capone, 35-year old Moslem Indian gangster, Sheriff Khan … was as cold and savagely ruthless as any villain in fiction. (Drum 1952b, 6) Kill the cinema and what do we have left? The municipal beer hall in the afternoons, and at night the dark alleys of the lightless location. (Drum 1955 n.p.)

Does a Southern aesthetic of cinema need to involve the artisanal, possibly guerrilla-style, practice of filmmaking we associate with a ‘revolutionary’ cinema of resistance? Or could it, in the absence of actual film production capabilities, also reside in the meaning production at the site of reception of mainstream content, in the Southern beholder? If we are to look superficially, or perhaps just conventionally, at the South African film industry and cinema culture of apartheid, we are most likely to see a fairly obvious reflection of the oppressive social relations of power: a colonially inflected, white-dominated system of production and consumption. In this hypothetical view, black (or ‘non-white’)1 cinema-goers might be seen as an incidental, passive viewing constituency that were presumably forced to relate to white/Western content. However, if we delve into the margins of this apartheid world of cinema, we can discern a different set of dynamics. Through a global film distribution system, audiences of colour were engaging with Western content and embracing a culture of cosmopolitanism and the international citizenship afforded by cinema as a transnational

DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832-6

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‘identification’ phenomenon. More specifically, in South Africa, ‘non-white’ ruffians and gangsters were appropriating the moves and stances of their North American noir anti-heroes, an identification that momentarily equalised the unbalanced dualities of white/black, north/south, coloniser/colonised and producers/consumers. We tend to think of the transnational as a recent ‘globalised’ sensibility, but as Menon points out, “If empires generated confined spaces of governmentality, they also brought into existence the sense of a world wider than that which could be contained in the idea of imperial citizenship” (Menon 2018, 39). Menon (2018) reads the global south as a concept that speaks to transnational affinities of coloniality and resistance, global power networks, and that emerges from the failed projects of decolonisation-liberation, dependent as they were on ethnic nationalism and the nation-state. Transcending the boundaries of the national, “The Global South is a conception of territory as generated by movement of people and ideas, rather than a predetermined space within which movement takes place” (Menon 2018, 41). The liminal state of the South African ‘Indian’ in mid–twentieth century South Africa, displaced from Mother India, and with maps of affinity spanning multiple worlds, is a prime example of such a Southern sensibility beginning to take shape (Figure 6.1). This chapter focuses specifically on Indian ‘spectators’ and Indian gangster ‘actors’ as a sub-set of this ‘non-white’ South African audience segment. From the 1930s, South African Indian audiences were watching both Indian (Hindi and Tamil) and Hollywood genre films in their own cinemas, and a flourishing Indian cinema culture boomed from the 1940s in Johannesburg and Durban (Jagarnath 2014). From articles and recollections in interviews, it is evident that Indian audiences enjoyed watching, amongst other genres, American gangster films.2 More specifically, in the early apartheid decades, South African Indian gangsters modelled themselves on Hollywood criminal ‘anti-heroes’. This was reinforced by their ability to play this role in Drum magazine,3 in which they were regularly featured. In the early 1950s, Drum’s editors discovered that a large slice of their market’s appetite was for stories about crime – and specifically ‘non-white’ gangs and gangsters in South African urban settings. Their interest was fuelled by the black public’s identifications with cinematic anti-heroes; introduced by Hollywood in the first gangster film cycle of the 1930s but evolved in the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s. One could view this ‘non-white’ cinematic identification with criminal heroes as a quasi ‘decolonial’4 act of cultural resistance (Fenwick 1996), similar in mechanism to what Stuart Hall identified as the possibility of ‘oppositional’ decoding of hegemonic-mainstream encodings. At this point it is worth thinking about a cinematic aesthetics of unruliness appropriate to the global south that stretches back beyond the contemporary periodisation

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Globe Gang’, Drum, July 1956. A dramatic exposé on a feared ‘coloured’ gang from Cape Town in the 1950s.

FIGURE 6.1 ‘The

implicit in in the term ‘global south’, beyond the identification of ‘the Third World’, to late colonialism. I think it is worth conceptualising this Southern cinematic aesthetic aligned to a more broadly defined decolonial aesthetic and performance of ‘disobedience’, in which gestures of refusal to colonial authority and superiority become possible, even before ‘decolonisation’ or ‘postcolonialism’ is conceivable. Mignolo points out how this decolonial stance way precedes the decolonisation position: “decolonial thinking and doing emerged and unfolded, from the sixteenth century on, as responses to the oppressive and imperial bent of modern European ideals projected to and enacted in, the non-European world” (Mignolo 2011, 3). More specifically in relation to cinematic practices, Lee describes the possibility of “decolonial moments” in the reception of a film, in which a specifically “decolonial subjectivity is thematized or visualized through the cinematic medium” – a decolonial moment in cinema is explained as “a scene, image, dialogue, or film

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mobilized by a new or deviant subjectivity that lays bare and critiques the ideological fallacies of the prevailing political regime” (Lee 2013, n.p.). The cinematic gangster is just such a deviant figure, who, as we shall see, alludes to the perverse nature of hyper-extractive capitalism and dehumanising coloniality/modernity. This view of a cinematic experience or sensibility ‘of’ the global south elevates reception (consumption and reconfiguration of filmic meaning by audience members) to the same level as the production of meaning in the global north. In this light, the appropriation of the gangster genre by South African ‘non-white’ spectators becomes a ‘performative-participative’ cinema, a ‘cinema of the oppressed’, and should be regarded as much a cinema of the global south as the act of filmmaking promulgated by the architects of Third Cinema (Getino and Solanas 1969). My research into South African Indian gangsters of the 1950s and 1960s5 indicates that, contrary to being merely passive consumers robbed of agency, local gangsters of colour were involved in a highly stylised aesthetic identity project in which they were, in a manner of speaking, ‘making their own movies’ in the transplantation of the gangster genre. Appropriating gangster ‘moves’ from the movies, and in the absence of the means of technical production, they were nonetheless performing (and presenting to their publics) their own localised gangster flieks (movies), in conflicts and displays on South African streets and in local media. Looking at newspaper and magazine articles on crime from the 1950 and 1960s, many of which are to be found in the iconic Drum magazine, a recurring theme seems to be the agency and opportunism of Indian gangsters as a response to the sham of apartheid policing. Gangs controlled illicit business activities in the Indian communities, such as gambling and dagga dealing; they also ran extortion and blackmail rackets, dealt with unwanted suitors and acted as transactional guarantors6 and debt collectors in economic settings. This is backed up by information gathered in numerous interviews I have conducted in the last decade, recorded conversations with older members of South African Indian communities that had firsthand experience of this period. At the same time as being involved in what were at the time not always seen as ‘illicit’ activities, some gang leaders were respected community figures and friends of leading businessmen – and were seen by many as ‘guardians’ of the community. Although opponents were roughed up and occasionally killed, a recurring description in of these impeccably suited gangsters was that they were true “gentlemen”. This chapter begins with looking at the phenomenon of South African Indian gangsters in relation to cinemas as both physical and symbolic spaces. It then moves into probing the narrative logic and resonances of the Hollywood gangster genre, as it took shape from the 1930s onwards – with a view to ascertaining its global reach and local appeal with Indian spectators

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and specifically Indian gangsters. It then looks at how Drum magazine appropriated and recycled cinematic gangster tropes for local tastes, and how a convoluted ‘cinematic’ conversation between local writers, foreign films and ‘non-white’ gangsters themselves emerged. Again, here I look specifically at South African Indian examples. Indian Cinemas as Sites of Violence

Perhaps one way to approach the new, fantastical, swaggering, perhaps even illusory, hyper-agency of these ‘actors’ is to look obliquely at the phenomenon. Local ‘Indian’ cinemas (showing both Indian and Western content) played a richly symbolic role in the life-world of the South African Indian gangster, both from the point of view of critics watching these characters, but also from the characters themselves. A number of reports and accounts of Indian gangster culture in the early apartheid era suggest that cinemas not only represented violent acts but were themselves somehow sites that incited or catalysed a performed violence. First up: Goolam Gangat, a legal clerk turned collector for the infamous extortionist Sherief Khan in the 1950s and early 1960s. A man supposedly prone to nasty behaviour, he was murdered ‘dramatically’ and publicly outside an Indian cinema in 1964. One account recalls the “so-called strongarmed [man …] who was a bully. He was chopped up outside a Fordsburg cinema” (Drum 1971, 59). Here we find a narrative logic of transgression leading to punishment. Another account again chooses to dwell on what seems to be the ironic but “brutal slaying of Goolam Gangat with an axe outside a Fordsburg cinema” (Drum 1964a). Soon after his death, yet another report ends with a literary flourish that visually encodes and projects the final scene of the gangster’s short life: Gangat was at war with society. It was a war to the death. But when ‘Big Mouth’ died – knifed down into the very street he had terrorised – nobody had won anything. And as the gutters washed away his blood from the street outside that cinema in Fordsburg, so too they washed away some of their foulest memories. (Drum 1964b, 55) All of the representations here insert the backdrop of the Fordsburg cinema as a relevant detail. But no reason for this detail is given. In its symbolic role, the cinema is figured as a spectral yet libidinal space of possibility and transformation, but also one of transgression – where you can go too far, forget your identity, your social constraints, and indulge your id. But other ids are liberated here too. Yes, Gangat the gangster was liberated by the cinema, but he was also killed by it, this image seems to warn.

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A causally connected act of gangster violence is similarly represented with the cinema once again in the ‘background’ of the ‘scene’. One of my interviewees recalled Sherief Khan’s gang attack on the rival ‘Malay Mob’ in Fietas (in part a retaliation for Gangat’s murder) as that incident “when they shot them in front of the cinema in Vrededorp” (EP 2017). But was he confusing the ‘17th Street shootings’ with the Avalon cinema backdrop of the Gangat killing a few months earlier? Or had the gangsters decided to execute Gangat’s killers, publicly, in front of a cinema in a kind of cinematic tit-fortat? There was indeed a cinema on 17th street in Fietas – but we cannot know the killers’ intentions. Whatever the case, the salient detail remembered by my informer is that it was outside a cinema. In these and other representations, it is almost as if the cinema acts as a site of incitement, a place outside which a fight can erupt spontaneously, or even be staged. Perhaps the cinema in some way represented the unconscious itself, that Pandora’s box of repressed, aggressive drives – and physical proximity to the repository allowed one to access those dark forces (Figure 6.2). In what is itself a highly filmic image, author Mac Carim (2013) vividly, visually, recalls seeing the flamboyant Junior Adam (still a youngster in Sherief Khan’s gang in the 1950s) with a cinema situated in the background. “I can see him right now with his white Panama hat, beautiful floral shirt, dark pants – and his convertible car, cruuuising past the Majestic bio. … I can actually see him”, Carim recalls (int. M. “Mac” Carim 2017). Carim then immediately moves on to remember a rivalrous incident in which he got the better of the gangster, after Junior gave his brother trouble – “And I just pushed him up against a wall, then he said something. Klapped [smacked] him a couple of times. And we never had trouble again after that” (M.F. Carim 2013). The “Majestic bio”, a cinema in Fordsburg, again in the background of Carim’s image-memory complex, incites a memory of physical domination.7 These situated scenes, staged in memory and sometimes possibly even in actuality, outside cinemas, hint at the centrality of the ‘bioscope’ in the cultural milieu of gangsters in South Africa in the early apartheid period. But gangsters were also often to be found inside cinemas, lapping up portrayals of anti-establishment ambition and aggression in the Hollywood gangster and crime genres, and the noir films that evolved from these. The Gangster as ‘Rebel’ – the resistance argument

What was it about the imported Hollywood gangster film that so resonated with midcentury ‘non-white’ South Africans, and specifically for Indian spectators and gangsters? Although able to recall aspects of a cinema culture, none of my interviewees were able to recall individual film or genre experiences sufficiently for me to be able to answer this question empirically.

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Malay Mob’, Drum, October 1964. A gang from Fietas in Johannesburg that openly challenged Sherief Khan’s gang for control of illicit activities in the 1960.

FIGURE 6.2  ‘The

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My attempt to explore this question therefore tends towards a more speculative or a priori reasoning. As a first step, it is worth observing that literary scholar Mac Fenwick has analysed Drum’s adoption of a generic, cinematic gangster figure in some detail. Focusing more on the African experience, he puts it down to the active search for a new ‘black’ urban identity: One of the more surprising sources of this new identity was Hollywood gangster films. The fascination with gangsters that was shared by all levels of cultural production in Sophiatown, including both the real gangsters themselves and the “intellectual tsotsis” who wrote stories and articles about them in Drum magazine, reveals more than just a thirst for escapism on the part of Drum readership and staff. What the Drum writers found in the Hollywood gangster was a figure who was always/already foreign to and in conflict with the wider state apparatus in which he lived and parasitically thrived. (Fenwick 1996, 617) Fenwick goes on to conclude positively that “the appropriation of the Hollywood gangster-figure by all levels of cultural production in Sophiatown was a remarkable act of resistance to white oppression” (Fenwick 1996, 632). This view concurs with my understanding of the Indian gentleman gangster, and corroborates a feature of the ‘criminal hero’ identified by sociologist Paul Kooistra: criminality “is imputed with political meaning” by a dissatisfied public when the state fails “popular conceptions of justice” (Kooistra 1990). But was there not more than this? Did South African Indian men not watch gangster films partly to connect with the ‘rough justice’ given both by and to gangster heroes? But also, to identify with ‘non-criminal’ elements, a transnational and transethnic image of ‘cool’, stylish masculinity? In Fenwick’s downplaying of mere “escapism” we risk losing a sense of those aspects of identification that are not reducible to the proto-political. The visual appeal of the stylized, self-fashioning gangster, the ambivalent reception of the ‘tragic’ narrative structure, would in this view all be reduced to an overarching “resistance to white oppression”. We also need to question Fenwick’s theory in relation to a common ‘black’ reception – whether Indian gangsters related to these figures in the same way, and for the same reasons, as their African and coloured counterparts. In order to delve deeper into the attractions of the genre for Indian audiences, one needs to get to grips with the characterological innovations of the early cycles of Hollywood gangster films and look at how these stories hooked audiences more generally or universally before focusing on what it was that specifically connected with South African Indian gangsters.

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The Hollywood Gangster Film

One can trace a nascent fascination with criminality and gangs back to the earliest silent Westerns in the early 1900s.8 However, the early 1930s saw the emergence of the first slew of gangster films, over fifty of them, inspired by real-life Prohibition mobsters such as Al Capone. More allegorically, they have been read as an encoded ‘anti-social’ reaction to the capitalist catastrophes of Wall Street and the Great Depression. The widespread popularity of the new ‘morally’ subversive’ gangster figure with its criminal behaviours was alarming to the governing classes of America, and by 1935 the newly formulated Production Code was mobilised to throttle the production of pro-gangster films (Munby 1999, 5). The gangster genre has from the beginning offered audiences an antihero and violently transgressive actions to identify with. Similarly, in South Africa, increasingly uninhibited cinematic depictions of sex, violence and juvenile delinquency in Hollywood films and their power to affect young black behaviours in the colonies was evidently something that began to concern government authorities in early apartheid. A 1955 article in Drum bemoans the South African Board of Censor’s decision to limit and even ban the viewing of more sophisticated films with age restrictions to African viewers: “Films from the world over are increasingly taking on a higher standard to compete with television, and so the subjects for the films have become more adult, more thought-provoking, and thus ‘above the under-14 child’s and the Native’s’ level”’ (Drum 1955). In other words, some films were no longer just entertainment, and could either incite ‘anti-social’ behaviour or instill a critical consciousness in the ‘non-white’ viewer that threatened the legitimacy of the status quo. As to what exactly was universally essential to the gangster form, this remains a somewhat elusive riddle. Scholar Jack Shadoian says the genre quite simply represented a “public fascination” with real gangsters and their lives of crime (Shadoian 2003, 28). Several literary critics concur that the superficial ‘crime doesn’t pay’ message of the original cycle of films masks deeper social meanings, while Cavallero argues that this thematic veneer was highlighted by the producers as a decoy: to “shift attention from the challenges the narratives posed to American ideals” by celebrating ruthless ambition (Cavallero 2004, 53). Martha Nochimson (2003, 3) argues that the gangster genre is differentiated from other genres and crime films by three innovative characteristics. The genre: (a) gets one to identify with a criminal; (b) is “epic in nature” and maps the larger social structure of the story; and (c) gives equal emphasis to the individual and the social (where other genres privilege the individual). This, I believe, provides a useful framework for understanding the ‘recipe’ of the genre; I use it below to analyse critical interpretations of the gangster film. Additionally, I maintain these three

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differentiating features would have made the genre, at least in relation to other Hollywood genres, particularly appealing to South African Indian audiences. Protagonist and Character Arc

Nochimson points out that in the gangster genre “the protagonists with whom we empathize reverse our usual patterns of identification by engaging us and our feelings with career criminals” who are conventionally the antagonists (Nochimson 2003, 3). It is this basic ‘reverse identification’ that allows for the experience of coloniality to relate to the underworld characters of the genre. The genre’s unique deployment of a ‘criminal hero’ is an obvious but critical attribute, predetermining the arc of the gangster protagonist (Leitch 2002, 24) – in a seminal 1958 essay, film critic Robert Warshow claimed the gangster was a ‘tragic hero’ (Warshow cited in Munby 1999, 3). Dancyger and Rush concur that it is a particular narrative about “the rise and fall of a man who has no patience to progress through the ranks” (2013, 108). Likewise, Shadoian claims that the earliest ‘classic’ wave of gangster films, beginning with Little Caesar (1930) and culminating in Scarface (1932), deploy central characters who are configured ambiguously – as violent, transgressive yet strong-willed tragic heroes (2003, 28–29). The tragic arc of the protagonist provided a basic narrative structure – “the hero’s gradual rise to fabulous power and his inevitable meteoric fall … allowed audiences to indulge both sides of their ambivalence towards an establishment that seemed less and less responsive to their needs” (Leitch 2002, 24). This in-built ambivalence permitted the viewer to oscillate between supporting the transgressor and ‘the system’. One should remember that the language of cinema has quite literally built into it the possibility, if not the necessity, of an oscillating narrative point of view at the level of the scene. A certain agility of orientation is required of the viewer, learned through the ‘shot-reverse shot’ pattern of the ‘decoupage’ shooting and editing style. Within a scene, a viewer is forced, for example, in a dialogical conflict between two characters, to flip between the two characters’ respective points of view – in both senses of the word – in the cutting between complementary over-the-shoulder shots. If, following Bill Freund, Indian audiences experienced the world under apartheid as an “inseparable mixture of oppression and opportunity” (Freund 1995, 10), the tragic ‘criminal hero’ of the gangster genre might well have resonated with their situation. Indian South Africans would have identified with the raw ambition and transgressiveness of the gangster – but also respected and appreciated the necessary restoration of ‘law and order’. The prevailing social order presented specific opportunities for Indians – but more generally, as Goodhew points out (Goodhew 2000), the ‘non-white’ working

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classes of early apartheid were at least partially invested in ‘respectability’ (including ‘law and order’) as a means towards a better life.9 Society in Focus

The gangster film is contextual in focus and consciously addresses social issues as themes. Nochimson says it “generally paints a panoramic picture of society and its values – all in all a departure from the usual emphasis in Hollywood on the purely personal and individualistic”.10 Shadoian presents several genre characteristics which centre around the social, including that the protagonist is fundamentally in conflict with ‘society’, and the genre renders visible an underworld of unsightly social ills (2003). Munby takes a broadly historical perspective, claiming that the films represent a “demographically divided society” and growing dissatisfaction with the ‘American’ national project (Munby 1999, 2). Similarly, Shadoian maintains, “There is an inherent contradiction in American thought between America as a land of opportunity and the vision of a classless, democratic society” (Shadoian 2003, 6). The gangster is a deconstructive figure, who manifests the contradiction between ideals of social equality/democracy and individual success, while “the gangster film contains the clearest exposition of this disturbance, the extremities of success and failure – exhilarating, top-of-the-heap life and brutal death – being its (initial) stock in trade” (Shadoian 2003, 6). If an ‘antagonism’ towards an unjust state and an unfair capitalist system remained the driving force of the genre (1999, 3), most South African Indians would have connected with this feeling of the odds being stacked against them. What would appear to reverberate here with most ‘non-white’ experiences under apartheid is the subversion of the idea of the social whole, a cohesive nation – the very notion of ‘the nation’ is deconstructed as a bogus social contract in these films. Shadoian suggests that the ‘ethnic’ (Italian/ Latino) position of the gangster facilitated an additional ‘outsider’ status (Munby 1999, 5). In its portrayal of excluded immigrant ethnicities and their marginal place in American life, the gangster film could also speak to the displaced, ‘minority’ experience of Indians in mid–twentieth century South African limbo. Balancing Individual and Social Interests

If society is dissolving, the family is a smaller social structure that shapes identity in the gangster genre, enabling a meditation on masculine roles, obligations and performances Nochimson (2003) remarks on the gangster’s family values – “the gangster protagonist is in the most profound way a family man who gives the audience a means of exploring family life, free from the stigma attached to emotions and ‘women’s entertainment’” (Nochimson

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2003, 4). The gangster film was a male genre, a form that allowed for the expression of (generally Italian) codes of assertive masculinity within a restraining framework of family relations. This tension between aggressive man-to-man masculinity and more respectful male roles within the family is something that would have resonated with the complexities of South African Indian masculinity. The Street with No Name (1948)

It is worth pondering whether specific gangster films impacted on South African Indian gangsters more than others, and if so, why. Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any official records of film exhibition in Indian cinemas for this period – additionally most of my interviewees could not remember the details of films they saw over half a century ago. However one film surfaces continuously in interviews, stories and texts – The Street with No Name (1948), a gangster film apparently widely influential on ‘non-white’ gangs in Sophiatown, Cape Town and Durban alike. Recalling the massive impact of film noir ‘anti-heroes’ on gangster identity in the 1950s, the coloured ex-gangster Don Mattera chooses specifically to reference this film: “We hated the straight ones and we chewed gum like Richard Widmark’s ‘Styles’ character in Street with No Name” (Mattera cited in Marx 2010, 262). Apart from being a cult film for township gangsters (as Fenwick [1996] also notes), The Street with No Name seems equally important to the Indian gang culture of Durban in the 1950s. In his biographical ‘novel’ The Lotus People, author and ex-street tough Aziz Hassim refers to the film, suggesting a strong identification, in one of the character’s description of the Michael John Gang: “Hang on,” Jake said, “These guys, can you describe them?” “Well they were dressed sharp, you know, like the gangsters in the bios [cinemas]. Like that guy in The Street With No Name, with felt hats and all”. (Hassim 2002, 292) Legendary street fighter and market trader Mack Naidoo called his Overport street gang ‘the Stiles Gang’, after the film’s antagonist, crime boss Alec Stiles.11 Mack’s investment in cinematic fantasy space is recalled by several interviewees – a neighbouring stallholder says Mack did not do much work at his stall in the Victoria Street market on weekdays. A “man-about-town”, he was frequently to be found in Durban’s Indian cinemas (Naidoo 2015). In 1955 Dee Salot pointed out the ‘Stiles Gang’ literally “took its name from the gangster-boss in the Hollywood film, Street with No Name” (Salot 1955a, n.p.). The fact that Salot, himself a gangster, was aware of the film and its influence on a rival gang is itself indicative of the pervasive influence of the film.

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The Street with No Name is set during a crime wave in a mythical (and globally relatable) ‘Central City’. FBI operative Gene Cordell is sent on an undercover mission to investigate the murder of a suspect and infiltrate a criminal gang. Posing as ‘George Manly’, the already masculine Cordell has to prove himself a tough guy to be recruited by the super-slick gang boss, Stiles; unexpectedly, he beats a boxer at the local gym to get closer to the gangster. Once he gets into the gang, the dramatic tension builds around whether Cordell/Manly will be able to take down Stiles before his identity is revealed and he is killed. We know this is coming because Stiles has an informer in the police. When the hero is finally outed, he is taken to a factory to meet Stiles and his death – but luckily his FBI colleagues arrive in time to save the day, and the gangster Stiles is the one to die. Generically, the film offered up a powerfully charismatic, brutally decisive and good-looking ‘bad guy’ in Stiles, which, as we have seen, accounted for a large part of its successful reception by local gangsters (Sampson 2005, 81). Drum editor Anthony Sampson recalls how the antagonist powerfully connected with ‘non-white’ audiences in the early 1950s: Stiles wore a long overcoat, sniffed a Benzedrine inhaler, and occasionally bit an apple. Beside him slouched his henchman, wearing a belted raincoat with slits at the back. “When this film came out,” Can [Themba] whispered, “sales of Benzedrine rocketed. Everyone munched apples. All the tsotsis wore those raincoats”. (Sampson 2005, 81) But there are also two narrative idiosyncrasies to do with the deconstruction of ‘authenticity/inauthenticity’ that would have made it additionally compelling to Indian youths – beyond just the broad-based appeal to an alienated ‘non-European’ youth segment. Firstly, the mockumentary innovation of the  framing narrative: the film starts with titles that assure us of its ‘authenticity’: The motion picture you are about to see was adapted from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Wherever possible, it was photographed in the original locale and played by the actual FBI personnel involved. But audiences knew the actors were not ‘FBI agents’ - the audience would have recognised them as famous actors playing fictional roles. This ruse is followed by FBI Director Edgar Hoover’s flowery letter to the public: “The street on which crime flourishes is the street extending across America. It is the street with no name. Organized gangsterism is once again returning”. Here is a historical character, a ‘real’ figure of authority, endorsing a fiction – saying that the story is fundamentally ‘real’. The first few minutes take us

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through a montage of short crime vignettes, explained by a documentary-style voiceover, which present the clearly staged scenes as some kind of newsreel footage. These markers of ‘realism’ lend the film a gritty veneer of ‘authenticity’ – the dark edginess differentiating it from the usual Hollywood escapist fantasy fare, even if the film can only ultimately be perceived by the viewer as ‘inauthentic’ fiction. Under the same rubric of ‘authenticity’, the film mobilises themes of ambivalence and identity crisis, when Agent Cordell goes incognito, posing as a bogus underworld player, to infiltrate the underworld. Performing this alter-ego in a hall-of-mirrors suggests that our undercover cop begins to lose his original identity and value-sphere as he gains the trust of his new criminal friends. Another Janus-faced character is the corrupt cop informer, who is actually working for the gangsters. One can surmise that these confusing and ultimately incommensurable character layers resonated with the way young South African Indian men were, in their new postwar, postmodern and cosmopolitan age, losing traditional Indian aspects of identity to more Western layers of being and behaving. But we might also question whether the protagonist’s dual identity in this film also speaks to the Jekyll and Hyde ambivalence of the Indian ‘gentleman gangster’, he who must paradoxically straddle the world of respectability (the caring family man, community figure, etc.) and the harsh gangland world of violence. The Construction of the Gangster in Drum Magazine

In the 1950s and 1960s the criminal hero haunts the ‘non-white’ public imagination as a figure of ambivalence – real gangsters were often feared and loved at the same time. This can be discerned in the circulation of the gangster figure in various narrative forms. Fenwick informs us that: The tsotsis and gang members took the image of the gangster and mobilised that figure against the white state’s attempts to re-tribalise them by making urban, black South African culture necessarily outlaw. The writers at Drum, picking up on this, incorporated the gangster figure – the black, Sophiatown gangster figure – into their stories and articles. (Fenwick 1996, 632) Fenwick does not, however, detail the next step: when local gangsters realise they are being represented and start ‘performing’ for their local audiences. But we will come back to that – for now we will stick to Drum’s agency in all of this. Apart from the explicit thematic strategy of the magazine (as discussed below), the fictional aspirations and imagination of crime fiction in the same publication clearly shaped the ‘reporting’ of the criminal and his

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crimes. Journalist and author Mike Nicol points out the blurring of the fact/ fiction boundary that was part of the fantasy work being done in the Drum ‘crime theme’. Fiction coexisted alongside fact, as well as the actual fictionalising of fact (Nicol 1991, xii). In her overview of crime fiction in twentieth-century South African writing, Le Roux gestures to the pivotal postwar moment in which black crime writing emerged, largely facilitated by Drum magazine, and its offshoot publication, African Film (le Roux 2013, 142) (Figure 6.3).

toughs thrash Gangat’, Drum, March 1964. Gangat was allegedly involved in extortion.

FIGURE 6.3 ‘Township

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The ‘gangster’ and the ‘tsotsi’ should be understood then as real identities emerging within social conditions, as well as simultaneously discursive constructs developed and circulated in the new media of film and print journalism – symbolic figures that signified fear, violence and transgression, but also, heroically, defiance and an assertive masculinity. These ‘media constructs’ were not exclusively shaped by the writers; the gangsters themselves performed for, shaped and were influenced by these writings. Thematisation of ‘Gangsterism’ as a Marketing Strategy in Drum

The fictional angle was part of the Drum marketing strategy, as revealed by Anthony Sampson, which, quite early on, aimed to provide a mixture of “first class journalism and an element of sensationalism” (Sampson cited in Clowes 2002, 28). Clowes points to the acute awareness of Bailey, Sampson, Nxumalo and others of the early failings of Drum to find the black market (2002, 24–26). Nxumalo helped reposition the magazine, introducing the white editorial team to what black people really wanted, which included crime: “black readers kept asking about crime. … [I]t simply wasn’t reported in the white press at all” (Sampson cited in Clowes 2002, 26). Sampson took the feedback to heart and readjusted the focus.12 Fenwick attributes this ‘crime’ market-orientation to Drum journalist Arthur Maimane and a visit to the bioscope. Claiming that, “You can’t understand our readers until you’ve seen Stiles [the gangster-hero]”, Arthur Maimane took Sampson to see the Richard Widmark film, Street With No Name (William Keighley, 1948), soon after Sampson’s arrival. After seeing the enthusiastic reaction of the audience members to the gangster-hero and the enmity they displayed toward the FBI agents chasing him, Sampson was forced to agree. (Fenwick 1996, 621) Sampson recalls the climax of the film, where gang leader Stiles is shot and “the audience groaned as the FBI took over” (Sampson 2005, 82). If we accept this cursory market-research, it seems that many African audience members were less ambivalent in their reception of the gangster figure than their American (and possibly South African Indian) counterparts, identifying more wholeheartedly with them, while directing animosity towards the cops as representatives of State injustice. This would not be surprising, given the subaltern experience of apartheid – the gangster film experience allowed for some emotional pushback against the oppressive system of daily life. Nicol concurs with Clowes and Fenwick, saying that Drum cottoned on early to the popularity of the ‘crime theme’, pointing to the breakthrough October 1951 special report where “Drum take[s] on for the first time what

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is to become an obsession: ‘crime, gangsters, thugs, tsotsis’” (Nicol 1991, 42). Sampson asserts that Drum’s working-class readership wanted the British Daily Mirror’s tabloid formula of “cheesecake and crime” (Sampson 2005, 15). Reading the changing preoccupation with gangs and gangsters in Drum as a market-oriented set of intentional responses to what audiences wanted is an important angle – but not the only one. One should also endeavour to offer a reading of what this new demand for crime from the public represented. From my perspective, the crime discourses that emerged in the ‘non-white’ public sphere produced a series of allegorical morality tales which have a controlling idea: ‘while Nationalist propaganda wants to project an image of an orderly and docile population under apartheid, here’s the truth of the deprivations of township life’, they seem to want to say. In this allegorical dimension, ‘crime’ emerges as the ‘truth’ of apartheid oppression, its direct yet hidden correlative. Different Modalities of Representing the Gangster in Drum

According to Fenwick, there are “three relatively distinct phases of the representation of the gangster, and of gangsterism, in Drum between 1950 and the early 1960s”: (1) early condemnation of gangsterism, (2) followed by more favourable and aspirational portrayals of gangster achievement (as “urban survivors”), (3) followed by nostalgia for a lost era (Fenwick 1996, 618). In sifting through the stories on specifically Indian gangsters, I find some correlation with Fenwick’s ‘stages’, viewed rather as competing authorial tones. If we look at an early 1952 stab at the new crime theme, ‘Durban Exposed’, we find an anonymous reporting of the ‘underbelly’ of the sunny city, “now becoming famous for its gangsters, gamblers and prostitutes” (Drum 1952a, 14). Somewhat hyperbolic at first – “the very name Victoria and Grey Streets strikes terror into respectable citizens” (1952a, 14) – the Indian gangsterism it describes (public harassment, street gambling, hustling, etc.) turns out to be a rather mild set of misdemeanours. No personalities are mentioned in this depthless survey. The general view expressed is that crime is the product of burgeoning slums, premised on social conditions rather than personalities or choices. The article concludes moralistically that “Africans and Indians alike are being corrupted by poverty and want, and turning away from their strong traditions of laws and morals”, while ending with the call to action, “this terrible degradation must be stopped, NOW” (Drum 1952a, 17). Where Fenwick proposes distinct stages of writing the gangster in Drum, in my analysis (of specifically Indian gangster reportage) there is a more complex, ambivalent mode of writing emerging out of the early ‘condemnation’ narrative. In my view, the moralising tone doesn’t disappear altogether – the indignant voice of social condemnation has just been diluted. From 1953,

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quite early on in Drum’s coverage of crime, the magazine’s treatment of the gangster as a type of ‘criminal hero’ starts to contain a strange ambiguity. This is what Fenwick calls the second phase of Drum’s ‘criminal narratives’, marked by a “style of writing that is reminiscent of crime fiction, and by an emphasis on the affluent urban-lifestyle enjoyed by these men” (Fenwick 1996, 619–20). While gangsters are more sympathetically treated as dramatic characters, their criminality is still ultimately condemned, implicitly or explicitly. The first-person narratives that emerge themselves often decry their own experience of violence. In a single article, one can discern a socially concerned normative commentary on the ‘disease’ of gangsterism and criminality woven into a romanticising of gangsters and a dramatising of events. (South African) Indian gangsterism is now represented as the product of both individual ‘character’ and social ills – but personae, rivalries and killings are what fuel these more personalised narratives. In Drum’s ‘Crimson League’ exposé of 1953, we find a new fascination with characters (noirish tough guys) and plot detail – the ‘crime-fiction’ mode Fenwick describes – interwoven with a recurring and framing perspective on the scourge of gangsterism, indicating a more normative ‘journalistic’ mode. The description of the leader of the gang (given the mysterious pseudonym ‘G.B.’) as “like a character out of a Hadley Chase novel: taciturn and very brutal in a fight” (Hancroft 1953, 12) makes the film noir rendering explicit. The journalist, writing in the first person (itself a noir convention), goes on to narrate an encounter in a bar with G.B., with dialogue that resembles the repartee of crime fiction: Over our drinks I said: “Tough life you led?” He soured: “What damn business is it of yours?” “I’m your pal.” His eyes gleamed dangerously: “To hell with you,” he leered, and threw cane spirit into my face. (Hancroft 1953, 12) This short ‘scene’, with its sudden but illustrative climax, shows how the writing draws on the crime-thriller style in its use of exciting characters and inciting incidents. On the next page, the article features a well-composed and clearly staged photograph of nocturnal gang action: silhouetted Crimson League gangsters assault a helpless victim lying on the ground. The caption reads “BEATINGS-UP LIKE THIS are all too common in Durban, where the Crimson League takes the law into its own hands” (Hancroft 1953, 13). It seems the magazine had no qualms about constructing and deploying fictional photographs that, at first glance (or possibly to the less critically minded), might appear to be authentic pictures of violence – but at some level must register as staged.13 At some level the very distinction between

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authenticity and fakery is deconstructed in this postmodern ambiguity – the reader is encouraged to let go of ‘the real’, and to surrender to the more powerful cinematic logic of visualisation. The article ends with a call to action that marks a return to the condemnation message: “it behooves those who regulate law and order to deal with organisations like the League with iron-handed firmness” (Hancroft 1953, 15). This is of course the final re-establishment of the reality principle over the fantasy principle, the hardwired ambivalence and oscillation around criminality that is constitutive of the gangster genre. The same ambivalence that plays itself out around the tragic arc of transgression in the classic gangster films – while we enjoyed him beating the system, now the gangster must pay for his sins. Drum’s ‘Gangster’ Tropes

The very early Indian gangster articles in Drum are written in the third person by anonymous writers – some pseudonyms do however appear in 1952. In 1953 Drum comes out with the fresh literary angle on the crime theme – a new sub-genre of confessional-biographical stories emerges in which Indian gangsters supposedly reveal all. First we have Old Man Kajee, taking the public into his confidence, followed later in the year by henchman Garrett Adams – then Dee Salot sets the record straight around the Crimson League in 1955, while Pataan looks back on his decline in 1959. Interspersed with these are similar reminiscences by other anonymous gangsters (see, for example, the revelations by Khan’s ‘friend’ (Drum 1956)), most of whom claim to have left the world of crime. These first-person narratives are superficially stories of remorse, in which the gangsters ‘out’ themselves, confess their crimes and reflect on the waywardness of their past ways. But the moral tone is just a veneer – the redemptive position of ‘looking back’ allows these narrators to legitimately entertain the readership with transgressive tales of violence, domination and betrayal, with lurid descriptions of stings, assaults and murders. In one article Kajee describes the terrible death of his Somali sidekick, German West, in visceral detail: Even now I shudder when I think of how West died. All that I see in front of me is a bloody mess. When the other gangsters caught him, like a helpless prey, they first beat him with sticks and broke several ribs; after that they chopped his skull with an axe. It was like a chicken being slaughtered. When the last blow struck, his body quivered, there were several violent convulsions and he lay still. His skull was battered in, and his face lay in a stream of blood. I could do nothing to help. I would have suffered the same fate, if I dared step out into the open. (Kajee 1953b, 26)

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If we are to believe one account that Kajee was hiding upstairs in the attic at the time of West’s killing (or that he was being hunted at all), it seems unlikely that he was hanging around to witness his henchman’s final quivering moments. Kajee’s view of his friend’s death seems impossible. What seems to be at work here is a cinematic evocation, on top of the crime-fiction mode. By this I mean, in addition to the literary tropes, a scene where the camera sees everything – that impossible point of view of the camera as storyteller, invisibly placed right in the midst of the action. Here we see cinematically, as in the climax of a gangster film, the ambivalent, “tragic”, ghastly ending of the gangster, who, in Kajee’s own words, ultimately “got what was coming to him” (Kajee 1953b, 26) – even if it was a death unbefitting of a human, and more appropriate to a “chicken”. From the earliest stages of the crime writing in Drum, one finds the drama of ‘exposure’ – articles on Indian gangsters playing a game of hide and seek with their identities. Small-time ‘hired gun’ gangsters, such as Garrett Adams and Pataan were paid to reveal themselves – but what they withhold are the identities of their bosses. Adams, for example, uses aliases for established crime figures, such as “the Sheik” (Sheriff Khan) and “the Boss” (Old Man Kajee). People ‘in the know’ would know who they were talking about, but the larger public and the authorities would not. Down in Durban, the chief honchos of the Crimson League never identified themselves or were exposed in Drum. Their rivals, the Salots, however, tried to use the ‘transparency’ of their revealed identities to boost their credibility in the public sphere. So while the Crimson League chose to remain faceless, Dawood ‘Dee’ Salot makes his case persuasively in a series of Drum disclosures in 1955, recounting his family story of hard work, while taking the opportunity to accuse his Grey Street adversaries, the League, of gangsterism and skullduggery (Salot 1955b). The Salots are not a ‘gang’ – Dee claims they are merely vigorous defenders of their targeted taxi business. It is as if through just going public, Dee thinks that he will have somehow proved the Salots’ innocence. His logic seems to be that the League, choosing to remain silent, anonymous, will conversely be seen to be hiding a dirty secret. Gangster Media Strategies – the Management of Reputation

The first-person narratives indicate that from 1953 some Indian gangsters realised that they could use Drum, with its feature articles and crime theme, to present themselves in a certain light and to their own advantage. This narrative modality in print was not unlike the relatively new voiceover techniques being pioneered in film noirs such as Sunset Boulevard (1950), D.O.A (1949) and Double Indemnity (1944), where the protagonists narrated their misfortunes, establishing a pseudo-confidential, ‘personal’ link with the addressee. In order to better manage their reputations, it seems some

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gangsters figured out they could narrate and present events from their point of view, and in this way hopefully make themselves more relatable as characters. They could also use the public platform to undermine their adversaries, as we have just seen in Dee Salot’s testimonies. Even if the Drum ghost-writers plumped up their lines, the gangsters’ published narratives gave them a certain power of presence in their life-worlds. How they were represented and how they self-presented (if at all) to the Indian community was something they needed to consider carefully, as it would affect their reputation – and reputation was everything for the extortionist (Figure 6.4). Old Man Kajee was the first career gangster to embrace Drum and ‘tell his story’ in 1953, and his adoption of the first-person mode of address is reminiscent of the voiceover technique of film noir victim-heroes mentioned above.14 These stories typically mobilised a duped protagonist who suffers for his transgressive desires in the climax. From his fallen place, he surveys his past weaknesses and mistakes, usually at the end of his life (or even once he’s dead, as in Sunset Boulevard). Seemingly in a similar position of diminished capacity and decline, Old Man Kajee concedes that “I am an old man now, fast fading out of the glamorous picture which newspapermen conjure” (Kajee 1953a, 6). In defence of the wrong path chosen, he argues that gangsters are not born criminals – they are just distorted when they were “used as a tool of unscrupulous men” (Kajee 1953a, 6). This echoes the popular film noir plot of the protagonist being duped, either by a femme fatale or other evil, more powerful men. Kajee proceeds to give us an insightful monologue on the life of gangsterism – how true a reflection of his real convictions it was is debatable. “Go straight”, he implores the reader; “you will live happily, enjoy peace of mind and feel a real man, a greater feeling nobody can wish to have” (Kajee 1953a, 6). We know that, contrary to someone finished with a life of crime, Kajee was working with the Khan network right up to the beginning of the 1970s, when he died. Old Man Kajee was not the retired ‘old man’ he pretended to be in 1953. What was he up to? My sense is that Kajee was doing two things: firstly, he was cementing his reputation as a gang boss and a man-to-befeared through publicising his sordid history of violence – the only way he could do this was to claim he was no longer doing it. Secondly, he was, through the false remorse of the noir narrator, drawing on the ambivalent feelings ordinary spectators directed towards ‘criminal heroes’. One could embrace the transgressive nature of the gangster only if they paradoxically paid for their sins. Joburg crime supremo Sherief Khan, on the other hand, steered away from talking to the press, presumably allowing his reputation to speak for him – that is until the Drum article “Sherief Kahn’s Latest Venture” appeared in 1961. Here he seems to want to try to actively shape his reputation in the press for the first time. The premise of the article seems to hinge on the

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“Cop-Proof” Gangster’, Drum, July 1956. Gang supremo Khan was known to be in cahoots with the police.

FIGURE 6.4 ‘The

underlying ‘dramatic question’ of how a mature Khan is going to fit into his new legitimate business, the Four Aces nightclub. Can this man, now in his midforties, build on his reputation to ‘go straight’ and make a new life for himself? Khan has decided to change his media strategy; he seems to want the article, speaking directly to the writer and posing for photographs. We are shown Khan and wife next to “his familiar black, high-powered car used for his various business activities” (Drum 1961, 57), the caption framing the innocent image to hint that Khan could still be up to his old tricks. Although the article ends with an anecdote illustrating Khan’s old-style toughness – Khan had recently hospitalized some young thugs after he “sailed into them, using only his hands” – one is comforted that it is all for the community’s safety as “there have been no further assaults” (Drum 1961, 57).

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The dramatic question has been answered: Khan is back – strong as ever, but more mature, contained and accountable to his family, pursuing legitimacy. It does seem at this point, Khan’s idea to was to clean up his public image, even if soon afterwards he would be facing a murder trial. However, a complete reversal of the new press strategy was evident a few years later, around the ‘Malay Mob’ affair. After failing to persuade her that journalistic writing was not a woman’s job, Khan threatened to shoot the fearless Drum reporter Juby Mayet if she didn’t stop reporting on him (Mayet 2017). Conclusion

What are we to make of these different modes of ‘cinematic’ performativity, looking back from a postcolonial perspective? In mid–twentieth century South Africa, African, coloured and Indian audiences did not have films made for them, and, economically speaking, were clearly not in a position to be able to make films for themselves.15 Nevertheless, ‘non-whites’ were able to enjoy and to some extent repurpose the ‘white’ narratives of coloniality that were made accessible to them. As we have seen, the conventionally assigned end point of film exhibition/consumption was just the beginning of a different kind of home-grown ‘movie making’. We need to think more expansively of what we want to understand as colonial/decolonial cinema practices – here we find a participation in mainstream cinema that is not just a passive reception or decoding of meanings, but one which actively engages, appropriates and recycles characters and plots. Additionally, one needs to factor in the liberating possibility of cinema to enable a sense of ‘international citizenship’, cosmopolitan identities and transethnic/transnational identifications. We could group these experiences of layered identity under the rubric of ‘hybridity’. Postcolonial/decolonial scholar Paul Gilroy describes the tricky but important project of “the theorisation of creolisation, metissage, mestizaje, and hybridity. … These terms are rather unsatisfactory ways of naming the processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse and avoid capture by its agents” (Gilroy 1993, 2). For Gilroy, it is precisely the ‘double consciousness’ of the diasporic black (or ‘non-white’) experience – being in the Western world but not properly belonging in it – that allows for a radical rethinking of identity and belonging, and that begins to blur the settled boundaries of black and white. Cinema has always held that radical potential to cross boundaries and connect audiences with ‘other’ people, cultures and experiences – whether across the world, or on the other side of the city. A relic of the Frankfurt School’s rather negative approach to popular culture is the notion that the ‘culture industry’ essentially stupefies passively receiving consumers, making them more docile and malleable by the bosses (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997). Cinema, popular music, television are

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‘lower’ forms of culture, essentially social control functioning through logics of distraction and simplification. The Situationist16 view of an increasingly visual and mediated Western culture is likewise one which paints a picture of robbed agency – spectators of cinema are rendered paralysed spectators of history, unable if not unwilling to change the social relations they live in. But here in South Africa we find a different kind of response to industrial culture in early apartheid – one which seemed to activate a sense of agency in a segment of the oppressed (even if it was through the incorporation of a ‘criminal hero’ figure). In identifying with white cinematic gangers as their equals and thereby drawing on their transgressive agency, South African Indian gangsters in the colonial-apartheid era were defying the assignment of racial inferiority in what Walter Mignolo describes as coloniality, or the ‘colonial matrix of power’.17 Paradoxically, in the offloading of American content to ‘lesser’, marginal consumers (in what US film distribution telling labels ‘territories’), a freeing up and re-fashioning of the subjugated self was made possible. Mignolo argues for local and oppositional ‘decolonial’ aesthetic strategies that resist ‘the voice of the master’: “Decolonial aesthetics disobey, delink from those regulations who serve the members of one civilization, Western civilization, but not the people in the colonies and ex-colonies” (Mignolo 2012, n.p.). While he is probably appealing to more conventional cultural producers as originators of meaning, one can see in these deviant decodings of the Hollywood gangster film, a degree of creative meaning production and a ‘decolonial’ stance that manages to establish and assert self-worth in a system of denigration. Notes 1 In this chapter I follow an anachronistic protocol of apartheid-era racial classification. I am aware that the continued use of these terms could be read as some kind of racial essentialising. This is not my intention. I use the terms ‘African’, ‘coloured’, ‘white’ and Indian’ – without quotation marks – to describe social constructions of cultural identity, as ring-fenced and experienced under apartheid. When it comes to practices, groupings and experiences that cut across Indian, African and coloured lines, I use the ridiculous term ‘non-white’, rather than the more contemporary term ‘black’. Most ‘Indians’ or ‘coloureds’ would not have thought or spoken of themselves as ‘black’ in the early apartheid period. Progressive sporting or political organisations however often used the adjective ‘non-racial’ to describe their shared identity of colour. ‘Non-White’ or ‘NonEuropean’ are the collective terms one finds in Drum magazine at the time. I use quotation marks when it comes to these terms to highlight both the absurdity and the exclusionary charge of the term ‘non-white’. 2 Mamoo Rajab, of the cinema-owning Rajab family, recalls, “Gangster films were extremely popular” (Rajab 2018) 3 Launched in 1951 by Bob Crisp and Jim Bailey, the rich and eccentric son of a mining magnate, Drum was the first magazine to target a specifically ‘non-white’ audience. It quickly became the main platform for voicing township issues, events and aspirations in the first two decades of apartheid.

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4 In Walter Mignolo’s sense of ‘border thinking’ from the outside of modernity, and ‘anti-colonial’ consciousness that is possible prior to the postcolony. 5 My thoughts on this cultural appropriation and repurposing of the gangster figure stems from my PhD research into South African Indian gangsterism within the context of early apartheid, and this chapter draws extensively on the last two chapters of the thesis. 6 Much like the middle-man enforcer role Gambetta identifies in the Sicilian Mafia. See Gambetta 1993. 7 It seems that in the 1950s cinemas were not just sites for ‘non-white’ confrontations – white ‘bruisers’ and ‘ducktails’ were also somehow inspired to demonstrate their masculinity in the vicinity of the Hollywood dream-machines. A Drum article mentions the antics of the white Southern Suburbs gang in Johannesburg where “there was even a pitched battle on the doorstep of a cinema foyer” (Drum 1955, n.p.) 8 See Grant (2007, 6). The famous Great Train Robbery (1903) was marketed more as a crime film than as a ‘Western’. 9 Goodhew understands working-class respectability as a “cluster of values and practices” centred around education, religion and law and order” (Goodhew 2000, 242). 10 Nochimson, ‘Waddaya Lookin’ at?’ Re-Reading the Gangster Genre through The Sopranos’, 3. 11 Another possible tribute to the film is discernible with the nickname of one of the Salot brothers – ‘Gloves’. Humphrey Bogart played a dodgy antihero called Alfred ‘Gloves’ Donahue in the noir-ish film All Through the Night (1941), a sports promoter who is wrongly suspected of a murder and has to prove his innocence to avoid retribution. There is a certain ambiguity in the moral fibre of the character, who is shady, edgy, but not actually a ‘criminal’. 12 He remarks in a letter, “I’m planning at the moment some articles on Crime on the Rand which I think should be fairly spectacular, seen from the Africans’ viewpoint” (Sampson cited in Clowes 2002, 28). The term ‘spectacular’ suggests that at some level, Sampson was aware of the cinematic nature of this identification. 13 The staged ‘photo-fiction’ trend is continued in the Salot series, as well as in later articles on Khan. 14 This narrative device is associated with the protagonist-narrators of nightmare noirs, such as Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). 15 The exception being Indian audiences, who were able to tap into the narratives emerging out of a booming Bombay industry. 16 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1967), http:// www.antiworld.se/project/references/texts/The_Society_Of_The_Spectacle.pdf. 17 In this view “‘modernity’ is a European narrative that hides its darker side, ‘coloniality’. Coloniality, in other words, is constitutive of modernity – there is no modernity without coloniality” (Mignolo 2009).

References Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso. Carim, Mohamed F. 2013. Coolie, Come Out and Fight! Johannesburg: Porcupine Press. Carim, Mohammed “Mac.” 2017. Interview with author Audio recording. Cavallero, Jonathan J. 2004. “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 32 (2): 50–63.

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Clowes, Lindsay. 2002. “A Modernised Man? Changing Constructions of Masculinity in Drum: The Making of a Magazine, 1951–1984.” MA thesis, Cape Town: University of Cape Town. Dancyger, Ken, and Jeff Rush. 2013. Alternative Scriptwriting: Beyond the Hollywood Formula. 5th Ed. Burlington, MA: Focal Press. Debord, Guy. 1967. The Society of the Spectacle. NY: Zone Books. http://www. antiworld.se/project/references/texts/The_Society%20_Of%20_The%20_ Spectacle.pdf Drum. 1952a. “Durban Exposed.” July 1952. Drum. 1952b. “Sheriff Khan: The Sensational Story of a Master Crook.” October 1952. Drum. 1955. “Films Banned to Africans.” October 1955. Drum. 1956. “Go Straight Sheriff Khan!.” June 1956. Drum. 1961. “Sherief Khan’s Latest Venture.” September 1961. Drum. 1964a. “Goolam Gangat - The Life of a Gangster.” March 1964. Drum. 1964b. “Gangat’s Bid for Power - The Life of a Gangster Part II.” April 1964. Drum. 1971. “The Battle of Bullet Corner - Old Man Y: Part III.” August 1971. EP. 2017. Interview with authorAudio recording. Fenwick, Mac. 1996. “‘Tough Guy, Eh?’: The Gangster-Figure in Drum.” Journal of Southern African Studies 22 (4): 617–32. Freund, Bill. 1995. Insiders and Outsiders: The Indian Working Class of Durban, 1910–1990. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Gambetta, Diego. 1993. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Getino, Octavio, and Fernanado Solanas. 1969. “Towards a Third Cinema.” Tricontinental 14 (October): 107–32. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic - Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Goodhew, David. 2000. “Working-Class Respectability: The Example of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1930–55.” The Journal of African History 41 (2): 241–66. Grant, Barry Keith. 2007. Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology. London: Wallflower Press. Hancroft, David. 1953. “Crimson League: A Name That Spells Terror to Thousands.” Drum, January 1953. Hassim, Aziz. 2002. The Lotus People. Johannesburg; London: Real African Publishers. Jagarnath, Vashna. 2014. “Indian Cinema in Durban: Urban Segregation, Business and Visions of Identity from the 1950s to the 1970s.” Occasional Paper 22: 165–174. Kajee, Old Man. 1953a. “My Life in the Underworld: I.” Drum, May 1953. ———. 1953b. “My Life in the Underworld: II.” Drum, June 1953. Kooistra, Paul. 1990. “Criminals As Heroes: Linking Symbol to Structure.” Symbolic Interaction 13 (2): 217–39. Lee, Vivian. 2013. “Decolonial Moments in Hong Kong Cinema.” Social Text Online Decolonial Aesthesis (July). https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/ decolonial-moments-in-hong-kong-cinema/ Leitch, Thomas. 2002. Crime Films. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Lesley. 2010. “At the End of the Rainbow: Jerusalema and the South African Gangster Film.” Safundi 11 (3): 261–78.

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Mayet, Juby. 2017. Interview with authorAudio recording. Menon, Dilip. 2018. “Thinking about the Global South - Affinity & Knowledge.” In The Global South and Literature, edited by Russell West-Pavlov. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2009. “Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity.” In Modernologies. Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism Catalog of the Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona, Spain, edited by C.S. Breitwisser. Barcelona: MACBA. ———. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Duke University Press. https:// www.dukeupress.edu/the-darker-side-of-western-modernity ———. 2012. “The Prospect of Harmony and the Decolonial View of the World.” Walter Mignolo. Thoughts on Modernity/Coloniality, Geopolitics of Knowledge, Border Thinking, Pluriversality, and the Decolonial Option (blog). September 22, 2012. http://waltermignolo.com/the-prospect-of-harmony-and-the-decolonial-viewof-the-world/ Munby, Jonathan. 1999. Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Naidoo, Moga. 2015. Interview with authorAudio recording. Nicol, Mike. 1991. A Good-Looking Corpse – the World of Drum – Jazz and Gangsters, Hope and Defiance in the Townships of South Africa. London: Secker & Warburg. Nochimson, Martha. 2003. “‘Waddaya Lookin’ at?’ Re-Reading the Gangster Genre through The Sopranos.” Film Quarterly 56 (2): 2–13. Rajab, Mamoo. 2018. Interview with authorAudio recording. Roux, Elizabeth le. 2013. “South African Crime and Detective Fiction in English: A Bibliography and Publishing History.” Current Writing 25 (2): 136–52. Salot, Dawood. 1955a. “The Salots.” Drum, March 1955. ———. 1955b. “The Salots - 2.” Drum, April 1955. Sampson, Anthony. 2005. Drum: The Making of a Magazine. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers. Shadoian, Jack. 2003. Dreams and Dead-Ends: The American Gangster Film. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7 CONTAGIOUS AESTHETICS Bios, Politics and Cinema in Contemporary Kerala Veena Hariharan

Disclaimer: This chapter was written and accepted for publication before the COVID pandemic spread through the world, dating many of our perceptions about the virus and indeed the world. Much of the proliferating information and discourse on the virus post-COVID, therefore, are not integrated in here, though the insights offered by the texts were an uncanny prognosis of the present. Viruses appear as authors, as agents; they govern us, they rule, they reign; they are fickle, whimsical, unreasonable, inconstant; they veer from one place to another; they shift shapes. Like all vulnerable subjects, we rightfully fear such capricious sovereigns because we cannot predict their behaviours toward us. Thus, we make up stories about them in order to encompass their peculiarities. (Cohen, 2011, 17) Virus, the 2019 Malayalam film, has the distinction of being the Indian film industry’s first “epidemiological thriller”. Unlike Hollywood’s well-defined genre of sci-fi medical thrillers: from adaptations of Robin Cook’s novels to films like Andromeda Strain (Michael Crichton, 1969), Outbreak (Wolfgang Petersen, 1995), Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011); the Korean epidemic thrillers made in quick succession Park Jung-woo’s Deranged (2012) and The Flu (Kim-Sung Su, 2013); or the West African film industry’s racialized representation as “Ebolawood” in the mostly white trade press (Page, CNN, n.d.); India has no similar cinematic tradition.1 Even though medical melodramas especially around mental health and dramatic disabilities make their appearance in Indian cinema,2 and Malayalam DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832-7

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cinema3 in particular, once in every while, the paths of death and disease strewn with germs, microbes, bacteria never found their on-screen representations, nor for that matter distributors or willing audiences. Arguably this owes to Indian cinema’s obsessive fascination with star-studded escapist fantasies, body-driven item numbers, melodrama and spectacle. The flirtation with the realist project in fifties cinema (Vasudevan, 2010, 95) and the New Wave of the seventies and eighties (Radhakrishnan, 2012), Malayalam cinema’s extended tradition of realist art and middle cinema under the aegis of a left-driven serious cinema and the newer so-called fringe cinemas notwithstanding. The reason for this is not that India does not have epidemics; on the contrary – from the historic smallpox to the infamous colonial malaria, the Surat plague (1994), H1N1 swine flu (2009, 2015), to the most recent Nipah outbreak in Kerala in 2018, to name a few, the country has been a fecund petri dish for all manners of viruses. The 2018 Nipah contagion is the immediate provocation for the film Virus, which calls itself a “cinematic documentation” of the event in its opening title. This firsting is one of the reasons that the film is a media object of interest. The film was released in early 2019, only months after the coastal region in Southern India (isolated also by being a left-entrenched state in a majoritarian Hindutva nation), witnessed not just one, but two major catastrophes – the Nipah epidemic and the ravaging monsoon floods. The epidemic that came first (May 2018), and the floods (August 2018) that are in ambient and recent public memory, at the time of the film’s release (June 2019), are alluded to in the foreboding present of the film. Another reason that the film is of interest is that it provides us with a viral lens or a viral perspective by which to understand a new generation of Malayalam cinema. Following Jussi Parikka et al., I use virus here (interchangeably with contagion) and alternately as metaphoric, epidemic and technological as much as moral, aesthetic and political. The Virus – Metaphoric, Epidemic, Technological

For Parikka, “viruses and worms threaten the conceptual ontology of digital culture in a similar fashion as epidemic diseases have been figures for social disorder throughout (western) history” (Parikka, 2005, 1). Just as a seemingly stable digital culture is “occasionally interrupted by external malicious code” (ibid.), so does the epidemic act as an aberration in the body politic, that otherwise subscribes to the biopolitical dream of hygienic containment made possible by various modern government apparatuses. Thus, the virus “reveals the networks of power – ontological/biological/digital” (ibid.) even as it unravels them. Comparing the biological to the media virus, Douglas Rushkoff used the term virus for the first time to refer to the dispersal of narratives or fragments of narratives in brief clips or videos through the broadcast media at an “infectious rate” (Munster, 2013, 100).

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A media virus behaves exactly the same as the biological one, a biological virus manufactures a sticky, outer protein shell to protect its own genetic code and to attach itself to other molecules within a cell it has invaded as does the clever media virus. … [T]he “protein shell” of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style or even a pop hero – as long as it catches our attention. Any one of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on where it is noticed. (ibid.) While unpredictability remains the overarching answer to every attempt to define the “virality” of viral memes or videos, some shared and notable characteristics of the media virus seem to be that they are humorous, quirky, amateur, everyday and banal. Just as there are bad viruses – disease, epidemics and malware, so there are good viruses, such as the ones we celebrate in vaccines, and hacker codes. Metaphorically too, viruses are invoked in the Hardt and Negri mode of parasitical empire feeding on the multitude or in the Deleuzian mode of resistance (Parikka, 2007, 304). For postmodernists, who see viruses as sticky, risky and countercultural, this excess is rich with creative possibilities. Similarly, the media virus, mostly identified by the viral video or the endlessly replicating meme (Dawkins, 1976) can be a contagion of “joyous participation” (Munster, 2013, 106) and “conviviality” (Varis and Blommaert, 2015). It can also be a case of “too much connectivity” (Sampson, 2012, 2), fake news contagions, alt right propaganda machines or instigators and perpetrators of mob lynching events, that we have witnessed with such intensity in recent times in India and elsewhere. Parikka posits his reading of the virus as somewhere in between; as “diagrams” of viral networks that capture transversal patterns and porous boundaries linking diverse ecologies of the psychic, mediatic, technological, biological and social. He borrows his notion of diagrams from Deleuze’s rhizomatic, anti-arborescent mappings or “assemblages”, Gabriel Tarde’s monadological thinking, and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). Latour’s ANT is literally borrowed from a phrase in Deleuze: You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 7) Latour, borrowing from the monadological thinking of his intellectual predecessor, the neglected and now resuscitated epidemiological sociologist Tarde, explains ANT in terms of a “fibrous”, “stringy” chain made of “weak ties”

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of human, non-human, living and non-living actors/actants, who function as nodes in a network (Latour, 2007). These actants are Tarde’s monads – each one “a universe in itself, not only a microcosmos, but the cosmos conquered in its entirety and absorbed by a single being” (Latour, 4, 2001). Rather than see individuals vis-à-vis society (micro vs. macro) as in classical Durkheimian sociology, Tarde maintains that “everything is a society” and “all things are society”, thus society is composed of “myriads of monads” (ibid., 10), actants, linked together by the network: whenever you want to understand a network, go look for the actors, but when you want to understand an actor go look through the net the work it has traced. (ibid., 12) New Generation Malayalam Cinema (newgen)

I read the film and the New Generation Malayalam Cinema that it belongs to in terms of viral diagrams that bring together entangled networks of the biological, social, technological and political. I do this by tracing both the viral networks emplotted in the film’s diegesis, the off-line networks of the spread of the real epidemic and the viral nature of the newgen phenomenon in Malayalam cinema – its characteristic features, narrative, aesthetic and practices – to speculate on a possible lens by which to view newgen cinema within the networks of the transnational. Ashiq Abu, director of the film Virus, pioneered the so-called new generation of Malayalam films with his Salt n Pepper (2011), along with Rajesh Pillai (Traffic, 2011), Sameer Thahir (Chaappa Kurishu, 2011), Rajeev Ravi (Annayum Rassoolum, 2013) and Lijo Jose Pelissery (City of God, 2011).4 This is a moniker ascribed to them by the trade press and not one they necessarily bask in; Abu, for instance, responding to a query about this, answers: We didn’t call them new generation (newgen). The term was invented by journalists working for film magazines. For us it signifies the digital conversion of the industry. It is a low-cost, digitized, democratic, liberal way of making films without big stars. In a way all films are new generation because it addresses a new audience. (Peninsula, 2018) Be that as it may, #newgen continues to trend among the press and youthful audiences as a convenient label, a heuristic category more than an analytical one, to group together diverse films and filmmakers who break out of the mold of an earlier Malayalam cinema tradition. Perhaps, like a good virus

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whose time had come to infect a stale Malayalam cinema – a provocation; but “for good or bad?” is a question for another essay! Emerging in the post-2010 digital turn, these young filmmakers broke the lull in an industry that faced stiff competition from neighbouring Tamil cinema spectaculars, was mired by controversies5 and straightjacketed by its male-superstar duo Mammootty and Mohanalal. Eschewing the grand narratives – the big stories driven by a single protagonist (played by the superstar), for the “small” stories (Venkiteswaran, 2013), newgen films introduced fresh faces (read non-stars), themes and urban milieus (Radhakrishnan, 2017). The actors, reading from improvised scripts, delivered “quirky dialogues” in local dialects, breaking away from the upper class/caste “Valluvanadan lingo” that had become the “mother tongue” of Malayalam cinema. (ibid.). Coincidences, casual encounters, and chance meetings “set in motion an unexpected chain of events affecting the lives of the characters drifting in the urban flotsam” and often ended in a chaotic climax of contagious, uncontrolled crowds (ibid.).6 The Digital Turn – Network Narrative, Aesthetic and Practice

Picking his way through the hype and taking stock of newgen films, Jenson Joseph asks: “Is a theory of the new generation cinema possible?”7 Joseph works through Alexander Galloway’s new media writings to understand newgen cinema vis-à-vis the digital turn – as a break away from the “aesthetic regime of modernity” in which cinema was a central institution, wielding power over the image-machine (Joseph, 2018). As Galloway argues, when Michel Foucault’s “disciplinary society” shifts to Deleuze’s “control society”, what really shifts is the locus of power, as it now gets distributed rather than centralized across networks of information and data (ibid.). The network then is central to contemporary image making, process and circulation. Aesthetically, it is captured via digital cinema’s embrace of the network as narrative and aesthetic. Network Narrative

If narrative is a “structural homology of the mode of production” (Kerr, 2010, 3), then the transnational circuits of contemporary film production and distribution is reflected in the “network narrative” (Kerr, 2010). An international trend, first witnessed at film festivals, it was inaugurated by Alexander Innarittu’s Babel (2006), which links geographically and temporally dispersed, parallel stories and protagonists via a vital circulating object. Patricia Pisters uses the term “nomadic” to capture the migratory nature of these films – a term she borrows from Deleuze to indicate not just the physical nature of these movements but also thought and narrative (2011). If the

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original signifier of these narratives was the transnational network, today the transnational is assumed, and the network narrative has become an aesthetic capturing the paradigm shifts of local capital, migratory patterns and digitally connected populations. Virus, characteristically newgen, is made up of “micro” stories, or now no-stories (e.g., S Durga [Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, 2017]), Randuper (Premshankar, 2017) – dispersed plot points linked together by the network narrative. Hivos Tiger Award winner S Durga advertised itself in its promos as a “film without a story” and is a rambling nocturnal slice of life captured on the go. If Traffic was the film that pioneered newgen cinema with its dispersed narratives linked by an artificial organ to be transported across highways from ends of the state – an orchestrated drive that links several networks – traffic policemen, drivers, strangers, then the network itself become the film’s theme captured in turn by the “network aesthetic”. Network Aesthetic

Joseph identifies a few features of newgen’s network aesthetic – among them a dynamic camera and a proliferation of shots and camera angles. The camera is no longer mounted on a tripod, attempting to shoot its subjects at a proximate distance; rather, we see “characters literally wrestling the camera towards them” so that even a “simple gesture by a random character in the film gets an exclusive camera angle” (Joseph, 2018). The track shot or the long take, now a staple signature shot of newgen films, was inaugurated by the much-touted single 11-minute take at the end of Angamaly Diaries. Director Pellissery and his team took great pains to choreograph this scene that takes place amid fireworks and a real-life religious procession of nearly 1,000-odd people. The scene begins inside one of the homes of the actors, winds its way through narrow back alleys, intertwines with the street procession and ends in a staged conflagration. Pellissery says that the scene was intended to bring audiences into the diegesis of the film, to make them feel that what they were seeing on-screen was not a film but a slice of their own lives (Pelliserry, Film Companion, 2017). Adapting Galloway, Joseph posits the “gamic camera”, “windowing” and “hacker praxis” as newgen cinema’s perspectival logic (Joseph, 2018). The gamic or the first-person subjective shot, borrowed from gaming logic, replaces the traditional point-of-view shot and is “literally positioned within the skull of the character” (ibid.). Windowing is an imitation of the computer interface – its multiple windows, drop-down menus and swipefriendly navigation – and captures multiple, geographically dispersed narratives that occur in simultaneous time, in a single frame. This shift from classical montage (“fusing cuts in time”) to windowing (“fusing cuts in the frame”) is an attempt to capture the “distributed network” as an aesthetic

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(ibid.). The best example of this could be seen in a film like Traffic, where the simultaneous but geographically separated journeys towards the heart transplant destination are captured through windowing. If the hacker praxis in Traffic is represented through the detour via the slum colony, located in the film as a regular pirate source, then, in Virus, it is literally the virus itself that hacks its way through ostensibly stable networks. Though Rajeev Ravi’s camerawork in the film eschews the camera mischief of newgen filmmakers, perhaps owing to the tragic nature of the subject, the non-linear narrative itself moves dynamically, and without warning, between dispersed victims, their backstories, and their afterlives in the post-montage edits of Saiju Sreedharan. As the virus captures the “complex non-linear order of network society marked by transversal infections and parasitical relationships” (Parikka, 2007, 288) linking various ecologies – psychical, social and media – the “networked contagion” (ibid.) seems an apt theme for a newgen cinema committed to the network aesthetic and network practices. These practices include an active collaboration by filmmakers with the online vitality of Malayali audiences and cinephiles, and with each other. It was thanks to social media that newgen films brought Malayali audiences back to the theaters. Abu attributed the success of Salt n Pepper, an unusual middle-aged romance aided by cell phones, that set the newgen rolling, to social media, and is the first filmmaker to thank Facebook in the credits (a common trend now). I started using social media during the release of Salt N’ Pepper. I didn’t have money to print posters. Earlier, the public relation thing in the industry was very undemocratic. Internet threw out middlemen between movies and audience. In fact, Facebook filled cinemas for Salt N’ Pepper. (Abu, Peninsula, 2018) Abu, like his newgen peers, realized the benefits of the contagious circulation of viral campaigns to promote films. Abu was already famous for his money order contagion when he made his film, and posted on his Facebook wall around the time of the so-called bargate controversy involving corruption charges against then finance minister K.M. Mani: Since our (Mani) sir is in a financial crisis and struggling to make ends meet, we should cooperatively collect some more crores for him. As of my share, I am offering Rs 500. (Facebook, 2015) As the post went viral, his followers began sending money orders to the minister. (Biju, 2017). The promos for Virus, created by Abu and composed by Sushin Shyam, were captioned “Spread Love Like a Virus” with a refrain

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(“Holler, and someone will holler back”) a musical contagion reminiscent of the field holler of Black slaves on the cotton fields, the genesis of blues, recently used in the Occupy movement in a direct reference to this lineage of protest movements. Indeed, the internet emerges as a key apparatus in the configuration of how cinema is produced, distributed and consumed, and is one of the primary ways newgen cinema’s newness can be understood. Older, analogic ways of reading fans either as devoted bhakts or as rowdy collectives gives way to a new understanding of a transnational “cinematic cyberpublic” (Punathambekar, 2018) space. As older modes of reception and circulation of films via fan work are replaced by new ones that include not just a harvesting of collective enthusiasm for the film or the star on the internet but also the considerable amount of voluntary labor that fans do online – monitoring, collecting, curating, circulating and producing “knowledge work” (Joseph, 2019). Tracking such activity around “cringe pop objects” such as Santosh Pandit films (a defiant industry outsider and one man-auteur who writes, directs, produces and stars in his own films), Joseph shows how theaters succeeded in cornering a large share of the capital from corporations such as YouTube and Google. Another instance, he cites, is that of the “International Chalu Union” – an online Malayalam language parody platform with “memes made out of captured images from popular cinema, in the form of tributes to cinema” (Joseph, 2019). This could be said to belong to a cinephilic lineage that goes back to the days of the Film Society Movement and Kerala’s art cinema public sphere and helps to explain the popularization of newgen via new media circulations. Newgen filmmakers are seen to actively work in and promote each other’s films, often pro bono, and in the case of Virus, with the Women’s Cinema Collective (WCC), itself a viral formation resisting the mainstream patriarchal union – the Association of Malayalee Movie Artists (AMMA). WCC was formed on November 1, 2017, well before the global viral #metoo movement caught on in 2018, to mark the protest against the reinstatement of the Malayalam star Dileep to the AMMA, even after his alleged molestation of a prominent female actor who had complained to the association. Bringing to the fore both the prevailing injustices in the industry and elsewhere, the collective was formed to protect and support women in the Malayalam film industry, and to encourage more women professionals, otherwise seen more as stars, or in the hair and costumes departments, to join the industry. Many members of the newly formed WCC collaborated as actors or crew on the film, and the film itself was produced by Abu’s partner, Rima Kallingal, a prominent member of the WCC. In an interview with a WCC member, I was told that the film was made because members and supporters of the WCC were being actively shunned by the industry.

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A Local Adaptation and a Hollywood “Film”– Virus and Contagion

A film that deploys the network narrative is Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion, (2011) to which Virus has been compared to in the trade press, and to which it indeed bears resemblance, if with important departures. However, screenwriter Muhsin Parari disavows this: Contagion is also a film about Nipah [sic] virus. But our movie is set in Kerala and how our people reacted to and overcame the outbreak is totally different. This film is about how Malayalis survived by tackling it unitedly. (E Times, 2018) In this disclaimer he joins a long line of creative talent both within India and the newgen, where unacknowledged “creative adaptations” or transnational remakes (director Jithu Joseph’s Drishyam [2013]), a remake of a Korean film Perfect Number (Bang Eun-jin, 2012) itself a film version of the Keigo Higashino Japanese novel (The Devotion of Suspect X) and Lijo Jose Pelisserry’s controversial remake of indie film Savam (Don Palathara, 2017), as Ee Ma Yau (2018), are overlooked as innocuous “remaking” culture, merely following the replicating logic of the contagion. C.S, Venkiteswaran in his description of the newgen says: While their formats and styles were deeply influenced by the global and national trends, their thematics were firmly rooted in Malayali life and mindscape. (Venkiteswaran, 2013) Somehow, merely localizing the story and characters in ways that are not necessarily translatable to non-Malayali audiences is seen as the creative act. Hyper-localizing and regionalizing are seen as the antidote to the global, and therefore a virtue. In the following paragraphs, I examine the film Virus, in detail, juxtaposing it with Contagion. While the former remains the primary focus, the latter weaves in and out of the narrative that I posit here. The similarities with the Hollywood film Contagion about the H1N1 virus – by the once-indie filmmaker Soderbergh, who gave us Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), a film that had pioneered the indie video revolution – a resistant virus in its day, are many. These include the broad template of data visualizations overlaid with a musical score, and the portrayals of the epidemiological investigations, health care bureaucracy, experts, naysayers and conspiracy theorists. In both films, the contact zone, either desirable or undesirable, the more intimate the more problematic, creates an affective contagion that both binds and destroys the collective “we”. If what the virus does is contaminate

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the autonomous subject, then fear, disease, and love spread like a contagion in both films. Munster defines the affective contagion in terms of Deleuzian “haeccetities” – as relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected” (Munster, 2013, 103). The psychologist Daniel Stern uses the “kinetic terms – surging, fading away, fleeting, explosive, decrescendo, bursting, drawn out” to capture its dynamic nature (Stern, cited ibid.). The points of departure from the original Hollywood film, which I outline below under different themes, and the adaptation to a distinctively Malayali context helps to sketch a possible template for a peculiarly newgen aesthetic emerging in a viral diagram that connects the transnational to the local. Aesthetics – Sound, Space and Scale

First, the low-key music that overlies the soundtrack in Contagion is replaced with Sushin Shyam’s high voltage violin and cello refrains (a staple accompaniment in Indian popular melodramas), underlining scenes of loss or cueing the audience to important clues in the epidemic trail. Munster identifies the refrain, rather than the loop, as what characterizes the age of virality, as that which “catches on”: Refrain is a repetitive sequence, a “being of sensation”, a composition of percepts and affects that catches on. It might be a short burst of birdsong, a facial trait, some rhythmically, returning mythic element. (Munster, 2013, 107) Along with the musical refrain, an incessant chatter captures the chaotic spaces of the government hospital in Virus. Spatially, Contagion maps diverse locations from Kowloon’s crowded slums to pristine Midwestern homes to schools, buses, trains, hospitals and labs in the US, while Virus remains confined to crowded hospital spaces or when it does show the outer world, it is as desolate and haunted. In Virus, the transnational circulation of the disease – Singapore and Malaysia are invoked by Dr Arun Kumar at the Manipal Virus Research Center while the index patient’s connections to Dubai and Sharjah are indicated by his multiple passports, chanced upon during the investigation. Owing to the much lower budget compared to the Hollywood production, the modest newgen film is resourceful in merely alluding to such offscreen locations and circulations. Rajeev Ravi’s camera work, supported by Shiyju Khalid, works on a green and red template, reflecting the ambient light of the hospital. Discomforting, albeit colorful, body bags heaped and framed against the rain and tightly framed closeups and midshots capture the claustrophobic hospital space and the personal nature of the tragedy. (See Figures 7.1 and 7.2.) Except for an aerial that reveals the Calicut Medical

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FIGURE 7.1 Body

Bags piling up at the hospital: Screen Grab from Virus (2019).

FIGURE 7.2 Closeups

frame the makeshift hospital: Screen Grab from Virus.

College, the primary scene of the action, the film’s cinematography creatively re-creates how an infrastructurally challenged small government hospital dealt with the magnitude of the event. In other ways it points to the newgen filmmakers’ own challenges of resource and scale, and the creative overcoming of both. Realism and Representation

Like Contagion, Virus follows on the heels of a real-life epidemic outbreak. The Nipah virus outbreak of 2018 and the containment of the virus was no mean achievement of medical professionals, bureaucrats and ordinary people, who came together to contain the virus in a way similar to how the state handled the flood disaster in the same year. Throughout the film there is a concatenation of the battle against the flood with the battle against Nipah.

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The ambulance drivers who volunteer to drive the dying victims at the cost of their personal lives, in a pivotal scene in the film responding to the humanitarian rather than bureaucratic appeal of the collector, closely resembles the way fishermen were hailed as the “heroes” of the flood relief program (Figure 7.3). This scene also brings the post-superstar narratives of the newgen cinema to its conclusion as what we have now are real heroes played by ordinary actors rather than fake heroes played by superstars – feeding into the demotic aesthetics of newgen cinema that I explore further in connection with the film. The desire and ethical imperative felt by the filmmakers in both cases to be true to the original, creates the realist documentary framework within which the films are made. Virus for the most part avoids the melodramatic, though cannot completely wish it away; the music for instance, noted above, is modulated to enhance affect and elemental nature. Malayalam cinema’s favoured melodramatic trope of rain is deployed in a climactic scene involving dead bodies and body bags, while the soundscape fills with the shrill sound of an unanswered cell phone ringing with a panicking wife desperate for news of her husband’s safety on the other side of the call. However, the film also self-consciously attempts to cut away whenever there is an emotional buildup or excess, and there is no melodramatic drive in the film to “plunge below the surface of things” or reveal a “moral occult”, features that Peter Brooks famously attributed to the melodramatic form (Vasudevan, 18). The character of Dr Baburaj, played by Indrajit, who is unflinching, even irreverent, in the face of the ambient death is the antidote to the melodramatic impulse. The desire for fidelity to the real incidents and public pedagogy forces the filmmaker into a realist mode. The actors are thinly veiled

FIGURE 7.3 Index Patient Catherine in Contagion (2011): Screen Grab from the film.

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resemblances to the public figures, still alive in public memory (from the brave nurse Lini Puthussery, who died looking after the patients, to the health minister K.K. Shailaja, who rose to the occasion and helmed the record containment of the virus). The facts of the disease are, in true documentary style, explained by experts – pathologists, doctors and health care professionals – while the data visualizations attempted to capture the details of the disease in forensic detail. Symptoms of the disease – vomiting, headaches, breathlessness, and frothing – are re-created in painstaking (and painful viewing for the audience) detail. When asked about why there was no attempt to simplify medical jargon in the film, director Abu replied that he felt the audience was intelligent enough and well versed with the original facts of the case. In fact, the screenwriters – Muhsin Parari (of Sudani from Nigeria [2018] fame), Sharfu and Suhas (who also co-wrote Varathan [2018]) developed the script in close collaboration with the doctors at the Calicut Medical College, who were familiar with the case from the previous year. The script, as many newgen films tend to be, is also improvised onset and by the actors, though the parts involving medicalese could not be, as they needed to be re-created with precision and fidelity. At the heart of both films is a desire to capture in realist form the unrepresentable facts of the virus. Technically, “virus describes a small quantity of genetic material, either RNA or DNA enclosed within a protein coat, and sometimes surrounded by a lipid envelope” (Cohen, 18). But how to represent the virus visually? How to represent this speck, this “transboundary concept” (ibid.) at the borders of man/animal, living/non-living? Both films fall back on forensic data visualization as the microbes, bacteria and virus are visualized as patterns, force fields, or dots in chains of events. The opening title literally visualizes the virus as an abstract diagram while the background score re-creates a mix of heartbeats, scanning sounds and a foetal womb that when amplified in Dolby theaters also sounds like flooding oceans. Frail Masculinities and Flawed Femininities

The post-superstar narratives of the newgen reflect in the films as a “vital lack” (Venkiteswaran, 2013) of masculinity. They are seen floundering and flailing, as in the real world where the centre can no longer hold. The anxieties of a “speculative economy revolving around global finance capital, IT jobs, real estate and stock market” and their “resonances in the economic and political realms in the form of loss of credibility/legitimacy of the state and political parties” (ibid.) are reflected in the films. Castrated in 22 Female Kottayam, disabled in Beautiful (V.K. Prakash, 2011), under-confident in Salt n Pepper, masculinities-in-crises reach a tipping point in the sick, infected and dying victims of the epidemic, as the virus depletes them of their last shreds of vitality.

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On the other hand, all the female characters in Virus are noble or earnest, epitomes of love and sacrifice, including actor-producer Rima Kallingal’s character (Sister Akhila) based on the real-life nurse Lini Puthussery, who died taking care of the Nipah victims during the 2018 outbreak. Unlike Contagion, where Elizabeth is blamed for her infidelity and irresponsible behaviour as infector, a secret that Dr Erin Mears (played by Winslet) the epidemic intelligence officer who dies serving the victims, has to keep from Elizabeth’s unsuspecting, pure, good and finally immune husband, in Virus there are no morally suspect female characters. The only slight rebuke comes in the form of a shout out from a patient while Sister Akhila is on the phone with her husband from Dubai, in a brief flirtatious moment that she steals from her relentless looking after the sick. Later in the film she will die of the infection in the line of duty. The other female in the film, Sara, has only one fault – that she loves doctor Abid (played by Sreenath Bhasi) and keeps it a secret from him, for fear of being ridiculed or worse still disavowed. She is more a victim, in that Abid blames himself that he might have infected her with the virus when kissing her goodbye. In these ways, newgen cinema also negotiates the moral landscape of Malayalam cinema that had until now been largely patriarchal, even misogynistic, to introduce an exploration of female sexuality and desire albeit circumscribed in the final instance by what is deemed acceptable to the Malayali audience. Patient Zero (See Figures 7.4, 7.5)

Carrying the forensic theme forward is the whodunit format of both films. Even if the films employ a network narrative, ultimately the search for the index patient remains linear – the investigators who drive the plots are in

FIGURE 7.4 Index

Patient Zackariya in Virus: Screen Grab from the film.

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FIGURE 7.5  Index

Patient Zackariya photographing a fallen baby bat in Virus: Screen Grab from the film.

search of the index patient/patient-zero. In a manner of detectives looking for the criminal, that in turn criminalizes the index patient, the first carriers are portrayed as wilful agents or infectors rather than passive victims. Although in Contagion the investigator dies tragically on the job, in Virus she emerges the triumphant, if humble and empathetic, survivor who drives the plot forward to its conclusion. Contagion reworked the tropes of the prewar US public health film, as Kristen Ostherr shows, where the undomesticated, nomadic or wandering woman, in this case Elizabeth (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), is the primary carrier of the virus, and the index patient (2005). Portrayed as a jet-setting traveller whose recent business trip combined with a night out at a casino and a layover at Chicago, where she has a one-night stand with her ex-boyfriend senator (who we hear later also succumbs to the virus) is the epicentre of moral panic in the film. And even though the film boasts an ensemble cast (including Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and Lawrence Fishburne), in true Hollywood style, the story emplots Elizabeth at the centre of the film. In Virus there is no focalization of a central character and the cast is truly ensemble (as is the pattern in newgen cinema from Traffic to Angamaly Diaries), as each character is attributed a story of her own hosting on the main plot of the film forming a dense hyperlinked network of viral narratives. The search for the index patient in Contagion leads to the adulterous wife who contaminates all in her way. The film ends with tracing the path of the virus – Elizabeth’s wild night out at the casino, where she exchanges words and a casual drink with a Ukrainian girl at the bar (who in turn becomes a carrier and victim tracing the virus’s transnational pathways). Dressed in a red sarong, hobnobbing with the “natives”, she throws her friendly arm around one of them and shakes hands with the chef, congratulating him on

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the pork dish he has served her: a handshake that will cost not only her but her near and dear ones including her son, ex-boyfriend and an entire population spread from a densely populated Hong Kong to a white pristine Minnesota, their precious lives. In Virus the index patient traced through the cctv footage and entry records kept by a curmudgeonly register keeper, and with the expert keenness and dedication of the investigator (congratulated on her job as the CBI [Central Bureau of Investigation] by doctor-in-charge), the index patient is revealed to be Zackariya, a resident of the Perambra region, in Calicut, Kerala, and it is his religious identity and transnational connectivity that is the centre of moral panic in this film. While Zackariya’s Muslim-ness is played up in the film, his hijab-wearing girlfriend and mother (whom we also remember from Sudani from Nigeria) are shown as devout Muslims. Religion and funeral rites, both subjects untouched in Soderbergh’s film, find expression in Virus though as a hastily suppressed vector. As no one is willing to touch a Nipah victim, much less bury the corpses, Dr Baburaj like his counterpart in real life, Dr R.S. Gopakumar, takes on the job of cremating the victims himself along with the help of Babu, the sanitation worker. However, there’s a conflict about cremating dead Muslims as the faith has a custom of burial. After some discussions that reveal the secular dispositions of the decision-makers (and for that matter the left-secular politics of the filmmakers themselves), a precedent of deep burial in Africa during the Ebola crisis is invoked. This is followed by a scene of burial and Muslims offering prayers at graves of the dead. Thus, the state emerges as an accommodating protector of pluralistic faiths, while still underlining the priority of life and personal security over the religious faiths of people. The faint whiff of Islamophobia in the depiction of Zackariya is offset in almost schematic fashion by Unnikrishnan (the Hindu played by Soubin Sahir, another newgen regular). A volatile, short-fused, if passionate and remorseful victim, he is admitted to the hospital with “altered sensorium” symptoms typical of Nipah victims and displays the most exaggerated versions of the disease in its penultimate stage of outbreak before the cure is found. In Unnikrishnan we can see glimpses of the “glischroid or sticky personality” that makes him prime target for a contagious outbreak. The glischroid type oversteps normative sociality by being too engaged, too caught in the interpersonal – that space in which things pass between people for periods that extend beyond the “appropriate” duration of social interaction. Irritability, then passes to others as they endure the glischroid type. Becoming overly socially engaged, the social encounter in effect breaks down and crosses back into an affective outbreak of sticky irritability. (Munster, 2013, 111)

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Technophilia

Contagion’s crucial insertion of the Jude Law character (Alan Krumweide) as a Snowden/Assange kind of blogger, declassifying information about the disease, casting the internet first as a place of utopia and democracy and in the final instance a contagion of fake news (following the trajectories of the internet in the real worl.This is missing in Virus, except for a brief television program interview where the naysayers are put to rest by the TV anchor and the sober authority of the State Director of Health Services, played by Poornima Inderjith, in imitation of the real life health minister. Technology, in Virus, is redeemed as technophilia. In this way the film underlines a postcolonial developmental aesthetic that valorizes science and technology as the markers of the scientific temper of the secular modern state of Kerala. Scientific disease investigation, laboratories and pharmaceutical applications everyday technological devices from phones, surveillance cameras, patient data and data visualization are seen as the greater good. Social media applications, Facebook and Instagram, are deployed as evidence, witness and pathways to reaching the index patient and tracking the contagion across networks to contain and quarantine the carriers, possible infectors and those who came into contact them and could be possibly infected. The decoding of Zackariya’s Insta story, “Identify this creature”, is the crucial link that leads to the origins of the epidemic.

Non-human Networks

Apart from the currency that epidemiologically links Zachariya and Unnikrishan and their independent networks, the other factor that unites them is their intimacy with animals – Zachariya is shown from his Insta account to be an animal lover, forester, and trekker who made brief forays away from the urban jungle on his Harley, sometimes accompanied by his girlfriend Haifa, into the nearby forests of Janakikaadu and Wayanad, identified as Nipah reservoirs by the cartographers of the epidemic. Sometimes he even brought a species or two home. He tended to his pet rabbits and is seen feeding them lovingly in the flashbacks of the film. When Dr Arunkumar first visits Zachariya’s home on the epidemic trail, he is greeted by a trail of halfeaten fruit, fruit bats that fly out of an abandoned well (the drinking water source in the house, also noted in the original victim Mohammed Sabith’s from Perambra who had allegedly contracted the disease from this single drinking water source) and then more gently to rows of ducks and rabbits. Unnikrishnan on the other hand is seen in the habitat of boars and is first introduced to the spectator in a frantic high-powered chase of wild boars in the hope of catching one of them for a hearty meal of cooked boar that he liked to share with his friends. Later he disclaims them as false friends, as

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they distance themselves from him when he shows symptoms of being infected with the virus as they share the meal over drinks and a gambling game of cards. In fact, the boar meat that he has had is seen as a vital carrier of the epidemic as it spread from fruit bats to boars to humans.8 Disease and Global Capitalism

Both Contagion and Virus place the ambit of primary infection in places of leisure: the extra-legal casino in Contagion and the drunk party in Virus that leads to the exchange of counterfeit notes in the ambulance. Even the night traffic policeman is infected during a breathalyser test as the very drunk Unnikrishnan blows into the cop’s face. Both films place the exchange of notes, the fact that Catherine used the ATM in Hong Kong to withdraw money is highlighted by the investigative officer in Contagion. The epidemiological link that connected Zackariya and Unnikrishnan was ultimately the currency (that his mother refused to touch, marking her safe during the epidemic, owing to a backstory of estrangement with Unnikrishnan from his father, locating his personality in a psychoanalytical crisis). In this way both the epidemic and the financial contagion are linked as the disease of capitalism (Parikka, 2007). Dilip Menon, in his article on the film Kireedam, talks about this “taintedness” of money generated through the marketplace rather than ancestry (Menon, 2002). Index patient Zackariya is introduced to us as a man who was out and about, the owner of six sim cards and two passports that reveal his international connections to Dubai and Sharjah. This global connection was also raised in the original case, where the index patient, Mohammed Sabith, was rumoured to have travelled to Malaysia (the epidemic is named after the village Nipah in Malaysia where the disease originated). As Parikka points out, contagions such as AIDS, Ebola, SARS, Asian bird flu, H1N1 swine flu, and the like, are more than diseases; they are “interconnected vectors of globalization” (Parikka, 2007, 288). Indeed, as Hardt and Negri point out, the age of globalization is the age of universal contagion (Hardt and Negri, 2001). As foreign elements invade the body, violating liberalism’s most hallowed tenet – the autonomous, pure and clean body – rendering it vulnerable, so do they invade the body politic of nation-states. National boundaries as well as international border patrol and governance apparatuses are primed to ward off foreign bodies as they are seen to replicate through the logic of contagion a triangular network of viruses, terrorists and disease (Parikka, 2007). As epidemic hotspots are marked on the global atlas of disease, they seem to be concentrated mostly in Asia, Africa and Latin America – in short, the Global South, while the global north remain cordoned off during an epidemic outbreak as “high security zones” or “zones of hygiene”, what Achille Mbembe refers to as the “cordon sanitaire” (Mbembe, 2003)9

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The Biopolitical State

Finally, I trace the viral diagram back to the local as the transnational is folded back into the biopolitical project of the region. Writing out of earshot of the last great (eighteenth century western) epidemics – when the “profound threat” of death had “ceased to torment life so directly” – epidemics in the new age, Foucault says, gave way to “endemic diseases – illnesses”, that sapped the vitality of life (Foucault, 2013). Death was no longer something that suddenly swooped down on life – as in an epidemic. Death was now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it, and weakens it. (Ibid., 65) Thus, protecting life against illness and infirmity via the rational instruments of governmentality – microbiology, public hygiene, universal health care and life insurance – brought large populations under the sway of the biopolitical state. In this biopolitical age, the body itself was seen as wholesome, pure and self-contained, while the source of contamination was always external. The return of the “external” epidemic, in the latter half of the twentieth century, this time via the “porous borders” (Esposito, 2013) of an increasingly transnational ecology, was contained, by isolating the source/index patient, usually the “foreign body” (ibid.). National boundaries as well as international border patrol and governance apparatuses are primed to ward off foreign bodies as they are seen to replicate through the logic of contagion – “viruses/ terrorists/disease.” Containing the disease meant isolating the source/index patient and the contagion emanating from this source. Both Contagion and Virus work through this logic of containment in similar ways by tracking the clusters/networks of the possibly contaminated and in doing so reveal the biopower of the State. Narratives of Containment

In Contagion, there is not even an attempt at a politically correct disguise; the film establishes that the epidemic indeed originated in Asia, in a pigpen in Kowloon, to be precise, as the last sequence in the film presents the facts of the contagious circulation from south to north via the white woman traveller in no uncertain terms. In Virus, while the global connections of Zackariya are alluded to, the disease is localized to the Perambra region, and Kerala itself emerges in the epidemic cartography as a self-contained state/region, ably warding off disaster and disease by the combined force of the State, technocrats, party workers, ordinary citizens and salt of the earth people.

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Contagion’s conspiracy theories about bioterrorism and pharmaceutical Mafia are only alluded to in Virus, that too more vociferously by the representative of the centre and the defence ministry while the regional State denies them outright as tactics of diversion from the real task at hand. In Contagion, the health care bureaucracy and the State are implicated, as they delay or withhold information from the public. They even siphon away the first doses of the cure drug for themselves – Dr Ellis Cheever, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (played by Lawrence Fishburne), and his fiancée inject each other with the first dose of the cure, over dinner, champagne, and an exchange of rings. Such negative portayals are absent in Virus. All the top officials including the quirky medical officer Doctor Baburaj are portrayed as honest beyond reproach and extend themselves far beyond the call of duty. The health care director, who heads the mission, falls sick and agrees to using her own body as a guinea pig to test out the new drug for Nipah even when there was no certainty that the drug would cure or would have no harmful effects. In this way, the State that is the regional State is seen as pure and clean. Indeed, in the face-off between the conspiracy theory spouting, sceptical centre representatives from the defence industry and the region, it is the region that emerges as the clear moral force. The film ends with the health minister’s pronouncement of a Nipah-free Kerala to a standing ovation from the audience among whom are the various people who fought the epidemic. As the audience in the film mirrors us the audience, we are meant to lay to rest our subterranean fears of theoutsider/ foreigner/immigrant and pat ourselves on our backs for protecting ourselves once more from the external threat of the unnamed enemy/the virus. This is the film’s mixed messaging, coming out at a time when crimes are increasingly attributed to migrant workers as their numbers are on the rise, ironically by a traditionally out-migrant state. The containment of the virus is shown as a concerted effort of not only the state bureaucracy and medical establishment but also party workers, civil society activists, ordinary citizens and the people, who came together, through popular mobilization via social media, in the same way the region tackled the ravaging flood disaster the same year. The ambulance drivers who volunteer to transport the dying victims at the cost of their personal lives in a pivotal scene in the film closely resemble the fishermen who were hailed as the “heroes” of the flood relief operations. This scene also brings the post-superstar narratives of the newgen cinema to their fitting conclusion as what we have now are real heroes played by ordinary actors – the “demos” in epidemics and democracies. As the distinction between the state and people is dissolved/annulled, biopower itself shifts its locus from the state and gets distributed in the network of ordinary citizens. In a shortcut, the state becomes the people. Or is it the state co-opting the demos and masking its biopolitical ambitions?

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Contagions and their containment invoke diverse networks of actants – global organizations such as the WHO, national, international and regional governments, as well as bio-medical apparatuses and pop cultural emplotments. As a zoonotic disease that spreads across species (“somewhere, in the world the wrong pig caught up with the wrong bat”, Dr Ally Hextall tells Cheever in Contagion, in a telling description of the cross-species epidemic),10 the worlds of bats, boars, humans and nation-states are brought together in this tale of contagion that ultimately in Virus becomes a heroic tale of containment – the “paradoxical politics” (Ed Cohen) of virality and vitality. In the film’s coda, Zackariya is seen in a bright hallucinatory light of a dream or angelic after life, restoring a fallen baby fruit bat to its primary habitat among the trees of the forest. And the film ends where it all began, casting a benevolent rather than accusatory gaze at the first carriers – the animal, and the human who loved the animal. Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dilip Menon, Amir Taha and Ratheesh Radhakrishnan for their rich insights and comments on the chapter drafts. Notes   1 Except for a handful of public health films, among them are early anti-malarial films, A Tiny Thing Brings Death (1949), produced by the Films Division of India, the documentary film division of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.   2 Margarita with a Straw (Shonali Bose, 2014), Black (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2011) et al., also see Bhugra, 2006.   3 Thaniyavarthanam (A.K. Lohithadas, 1987), Aaram Thampuraan (Shaji Kailas, 1997), Manichitrathaazhu (Fazil, 1993), and others.   4 Sometimes the corpus includes films such as the more arthouse films by directors like Shalini Nair (Akam, 2011), Sanal Kumar Sashidharan (S Durga, 2017), or Vipin Vijay, Jayan Cherian et al.   5 Controversies created by its union AMMA (Association for Malayalam Movies Artists) that included the ban of the talented Malayalam actor Thilakan according to C.S. Venkiteswaran.   6 Lijo Jose “choreographed chaos”, the 11-minute long take in Angamaly Diaries much talked about.   7 Jenson Joseph, see essay.   8 “Pigs are not kosher”, the Israeli premier is quoted as saying in response to the swine flu epidemic.   9 COVID has blown away most of these assumptions though carriers of the disease from non-Western nations continue to be doubly stigmatized. 10 Perhaps best captured in Deleuze’s metaphorical-biological “wasp-orchid” assemblage: the “becoming-orchid of the wasp” and the “becoming-wasp of the orchid” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 10).

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References Abu, Ashiq. Interview to The Peninsula, 7 March 2018. ———. Interview in E Times, September 4, 2018. Bhugra, Dinesh. (2006) Mad Tales from Bollywood: Representation of Mental Illness in Conventional Indian Cinema. New York: Psychology Press. Biju, P.R. (2017) Political Internet: State and Politics in the Age of Social Media. London: Routledge. Cohen, Ed. (2011) “Paradoxical Politics of Viral Containment: Or How Scale Undoes All”, Social Text, 29 (1) (106), pp. 15–35. Dawkins, Richard. (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Feliz Guattari. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Continuum. Esposito, Roberto. (2013) “Biopolitics” in Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (ed.) Biopolitics: A Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 317–349. Foucault, Michel. (2013) “Right of Death and Power over Life” in Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (ed.) Biopolitics: A Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, pp 41–60. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2001) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jose, Lijo Pellisserry. (2017), “Inside a Scene”, Interview to Film Companion, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NGy0R9vTFE ———. (2019) Personal Interview. Joseph, Jenson. (2018) “Is a Theory of New Generation Possible?” Chalachitra Sameeksha, October, pp. 28–40. ———. (2019) “Just a Buffalo or not? A Nuanced Take on Lijo Jose Pellisserry’s Jallikattu”, Film Companion, November 20. Kerr, Paul. (2010) “Babel’s Network Narrative: Packaging a Globalized Art Cinema”, Transnational Cinemas, 1(1), pp. 37–51. Latour, Bruno. (2002) “Gabriel Tarde and the end of the Social” in Patrick Joyce (ed.) The Social in Question. New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences. London: Routledge, pp. 117–132. ———. (2007) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mbembe, Achille. (2003), “Necropolitics”, Public Culture, 15(1), Winter 2003. Menon, Dilip. (2002) “The Outcastes of Malayalam Cinema”. Unpublished MS. Munster, Anna. (2013) Going Viral in an Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Nair, Tara S. (2017) “Women in Cinema Collective and the Malayalam Film Industry”, Economic and Political Weekly, 52(50). Ostherr, Kristen. (2005) Cinematic Prophylaxis. Durham: Duke University Press. Page, Thomas. (n.d.) “Ebolawood: Liberia’s Golden Age of Film”, CNN [online]. Available at: http://www.cnn.com (Accessed: 16 February 2021) Parikka, Jussi. (2005) “Viral Noise and the (Dis) Order of the Digital Culture: Introduction”, M/C Journal, 7 (6). ———. (2007) “Contagion and Repetition: On the Viral Logic of Network Culture”, ephemera, 7(2), pp. 287–308. Pillai, Meena T. (2017) “The Many Misogynies of Malayalam Cinema”, Economic and Political Weekly, 52 (33).

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Pisters, Patricia. (2011) “The Mosaic Film: Nomadic Style and Politics in Transnational Media Culture”, Thamyris Intersecting, 23, pp. 175–190. Punathambekar, Aswin. (2018) “We’re Online, Not on the Streets’: Indian Cinema, New Media and Participatory Culture” in Aswin Punathmabekar and Anandam Kavoori (ed.) Global Bollywood. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 282–299. Radhakrishnan, Ratheesh. (2012) “Aesthetic Dislocations: A Re-take on Malayalam Cinema of the 1970s”, South Asian Popular Culture, 10 (1), pp. 91–102. Radhakrishnan, Ratheesh. (2017) “Urban/the City: An Experiment Called the “Kochi Film””, positions, 25 (1), pp. 173–194. Sampson, Tony. (2012) Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Varis, Piia and Jan Blommaert. (2015) “Conviviality and Collectives on Social Media: Virality, Memes, and New Social Structures”, Multilingual Margins, 2 (1), pp. 31–45. Vasudevan, Ravi. (2010) The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema. Delhi: Oxford. Venkiteswaran, C.S. (2013) “Goodbye to the Superstar era”, The Hindu, April 13.

8 DEALING WITH THE PRECARIOUS CITY Violence, Memory and Rhythms of Endurance in La sombra del caminante (Ciro Guerra 2005) & La sociedad del semáforo (Ruben Mendoza, 2010) Luis F. Rosero Amaya

Colombian Armed Conflict, Urban Violence(s) and Their Representations in Contemporary Urban Cinema The Discourse of Violence in Colombian Cinema

Since the middle of the 1960s, Colombian cinema has addressed the so-called violencias (“violences”, in plural) in multiple and differently located perspectives. A great number of national and transnational film productions have tried to face up to and represent the manifold forms of violent realities that have tragic repercussions on the public and individual spheres of life. Within the historiography, the term “violences” refers to the interdependent waves of violence, each of which impacts on the historical processes and violent social conflicts that have affected the country for approximately the last seven decades (Palacios, 2012, pp. 21–22). The first wave of violencia took place in the ten-years civil war between 1948 and 1958 in which the Conservative and Liberal parties destructively conducted their political disputes. The second wave marks the emergence of ideologically and economically oriented illegal armed groups during the Cold War. In contrast to these two first waves of violence, which took place mainly in the extensive territory of the countryside, the third wave of violence is linked to the emergence and strengthening of the drug cartels and the related extension of the conflict to the city. The notion of violences serves a heuristic purpose as a historical concept that embraces a plurality of violent phenomena, related to each other, yet with different causes. In general, the causes of these conflicts are diversified. On the one hand, illegal armed groups with different ideologies and interests (guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug Mafias) occupy enormous areas in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832-8

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countryside, thus menacing innocent farmers’ lives, who then become politically displaced and are forced to emigrate to the principal cities. The struggle between the groups was a consequence of ideological hostilities as much as of economic causes and the desire for control over territories. Within this panorama, the forces of law and order (army and police) try to fight for the control of those zones in conflict. But, in some cases, they also threaten the lives of the innocent population. The historian Marco Palacios defines such diversified forms of conflicts as “public violence”. This term describes every form of social action by state power that plays out a discourse of legitimation by means of violence (2012, p. 25). Colombian armed conflict, as Palacios argues, obviously has a direct relationship with violence, but it reveals itself as a social conflict that inserts into manifold social process (26, see also Rojas 2002). Far from being unfolded solely in the countryside, the public violences extend to and damage the social sphere in general. The reason is that it extends to all forms of organized crime (individual and collective kidnapping, extortion, etc., in the countryside and the cities), as much as to national politics (the connection between politicians and far-right paramilitary groups), urban criminality, and extreme poverty. In the Colombian context, the research on the social and discursive impact of the violences investigates these phenomena in their articulation with the social membrane and everyday life. As Jesús MartinBarbero points out, cultural production and representations have their own position, in one way or another, on the discourses of violences. Therefore, the focus is shifted towards an anthropological as much as a personal dimension (Pécaut, 2001; Suárez, 2010; Burkhardt 2019, pp. 52–55). There is more or less general agreement that a wave of “urban violence” became prevalent from the middle of the 1980s to approximately the first decade of the twenty-first century. Thousands of displaced persons were forced to emigrate to the capital and other important cities, for some form of public violences have threatened them or ejected them from their pieces of land and properties. This forced emigration brings about the construction of peripheral slums and the steady presence of persons living indigent lives. A further factor is entangled simultaneously with the urbanization of the violence: the fluxes of globalization give shelter to new precarious, illegal, globalized and informal forms of economy, as Castells conceptualizes such global fluxes (1998; see also Kantaris 2008). Conflict, Violence and Memory in Colombia’s Contemporary Urban Cinema

Since the 1990s, a considerable number of film productions have been facing these complex, dislocated and dissonant realities that are manifested mercilessly in everyday urban life. Contemporary urban cinema seems to share

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some features in its modes of production as much as representational approaches to the experience of violence. A great part of the most relevant filmic representations of Colombian cities are, deliberately or not, concerned with the representational question of how to address the experience of violence by focusing on subaltern or vulnerable social agents – or put otherwise, the social bodies who have suffered some sort of violence (Osorio Mejía, 2005; Suárez 2010, 2012; Burkhardt, 2019). These peripheral subjects begin to determine the image of the city and constitute the axis of the impact of violent conflict on the social and personal. Promoted by a new film law in 2003, Colombian film production experienced a qualitative change (Suárez, 2012; Burkhardt, 2019). Many of the most important films that have emerged from this turning point are supported by transnational film producers and participate in international film festivals. Thus, the films’ representations of violence and urban life are sometimes inflected by new technical and aesthetic mechanisms. Guerra’s The Wanderer’s Shadow (2005) and Mendoza’s The Stoplight Society (2010) belong to this cinematic shift. Furthermore, they are also part of a range of films addressing urban experiences of violence and conflicts. In this sense, both films relate in parallel to a tradition of urban cinema in Colombia that arose in the 1990s with realistic and testimony-like intent – such as Victor Gaviria’s La Rodrigo D. No futuro (1989) and La vendedora de rosas (1998) (see Jáuregui & Suárez 2002). But another cinematic referent that they are associated with is Luis Opina and Carlos Mayolo’s aesthetic-politic project through urban films as well as their critique of pornomiseria (“poverty porn”) in Agarrando pueblo (The Vampires of Poverty, 1978). Ciro Guerra and Ruben Mendoza’s films are aware both of such referents as well as the implications of an ethic of representation that generates images of violence and the lives of precarious, marginal and peripheral subjects. The Urban Screen as a Place of Temporal Fluctuations: Violence, The Work of Memory and the Rhythms of Precariousness

As my analysis of the films attempts to highlight, paradigmatic films like Guerra’s The Wanderer’s Shadow and Mendoza’s The Stoplight Society offer a view on modes of subjectivity, processes of interaction and affiliation, and contradictory and dislocated temporalities. The main argument of my chapter starts with two premises. First, both films explore a temporal experience of decomposition whereby violence and conflict act as forces that disrupt temporal coordinates of urban subjects. This crisis of the urban subject is historically inflected in that the films relate the subjects’ past traumas to Colombia’s context of violence. Second, the films represent the subjects of the city as precarious agents who are eventually capable of rearranging those

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toxic circumstances, with the purpose of recalibrating their state of inertia and moving towards an aspiration. As a result, both film’s temporal parameters set up a what I refer to as recomposition of the subject and rhythms of endurance. Drawing on a large variety of urban imageries, narrations, figures and aesthetic devices, these films heighten the cinematic possibilities of modelling the dynamics of urban temporalities (Pratt & San Juan, 2014). But what is even more relevant to the debate around a Southern film aesthetic, is that the films’ style and narratives model particular vantage points that contest unidimensional and individualistic views on urban subjectivities and temporalities. But before I begin with the film analysis, I would like to clarify a few overarching concepts which the films model in their aesthetic terms: loss of temporal referents, precarious subjectivities and rhythms of endurance. The social effects of the longue durée of violence in Colombian history mutate into a collapse of spatio-temporal referents. Sociologist Daniel Pécaut observes, “I think that the terror increasingly induces the effect of the weakening of territories, blows up the temporal referents, and jeopardizes the possibilities of the affirmation of subjects amidst contradictory referents.”1 Pécaut fleshes out the multiple denigrated temporalities emerging in different forms of conflicts, so they can provide us with a conceptual tool that helps understand the temporal horizons and experiences of violence. His analysis spells out the ways in which social agents living within an environment of violence – as in the case of the urban subjects in recent films – are deprived of consistent experiences of historical time. Thus, they may very likely experience vague coordinates of temporalities, and a loss of bearings arising from an excess of temporal referents. In this way, the experience of the immediate present ends up as an experience of time without a “horizon of expectation” and without even temporarily stable past referents (2001, p. 242). Stable temporal referents, Pécaut argues, are necessary to build up any civic temporal consciousness. At the same time, this immediateness of the present converges with a long duration in which every new instance of violences come to be assimilated. In this sense, the experience of repetition may come to be predicated on a mythical temporality. It is conducive to a temporal sense of being that violence “has always been there” and is reproduced constantly (2001, p. 243). Considering this double inflection of a temporality of violence, Pécaut describes such experiences of time as “kaleidoscopic configurations” of time, since the lack of distinctions between the immediate present and the mythical time cause a decline of historical temporality, leading to “de-temporalization” (2001, p. 246). I believe that Colombian contemporary cinema carries out a commitment to recalibrating what Pécaut refers to as “loss of temporal referents”. Cultural media are placed to provide an answer for this temporal impasse, since they embody “[t]he tendency to find another angle of focus in intimate stories to the critique of historical amnesia” (Suárez, 2012, p. 158).

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Nevertheless, the work of memory carried out by some contemporary filmic representations reveals other dimensions of the life of the city. These films have adopted the task of depicting the social bodies swamped by socio-economic conditions and constraints. Such a state of volatility in projecting futures is a distinguishing feature of precariousness. These are vulnerable populations living on the streets and the so-called poor neighbourhoods. The urban subjects that this cinema represents do not simply stand for archetypes of an autonomous subaltern collective. Instead, they are depicted as interacting through multiple social articulations in the complexities of urban life. In this sense, an important number of Colombian films from the last decade focus on precarious lives. In this sense, it takes part in an overall transnational “cinema of the precarious” (Rueda, 2018), a cinema that consciously looks at subjects who, both in urban and rural environments, try to surmount persistent adversities by embodying fluctuating practical strategies, innovative social ensembles and unfixed modes of improvisation. The notion of precariousness has usually been associated with contemporary political thinkers like Judith Butler, among others. In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Butler remarks how waves of economic neoliberalism render vulnerable citizens’ lives. But the adversities and constrictions unleashed by precarity, she argues, might also be reframed to set up alternative spaces and forms of agency. Therefore, one could argue that the analysis of the precarious may lead us to conceive of other kinds of secretive, experimental, yet promising temporalities. Nevertheless, I suggest that we need another conceptual framework that allows us to understand a concept of precariousness keeping up with social and urban conditions characteristic of urban spaces of the Global South (Bystrom, Harris and Webber, 2018). In his analysis of conditions of urban life in several cities from the Urban South, AbdouMaliq Simone refers to precariousness as the socio-economic circumstance that gradually spoils labour conditions to the extent of corroding social life spheres, thus forcing social agents to live in a state of vulnerability (2019a, 4). From a macro-level perspective, it ensues from the unstable operations of a globalized neoliberal capitalism (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 81–87). In this respect, the precariat is simultaneously deprived of conditions relating to stability, such as employment or residence (Simone 2019a, pp. 5–6). Thus, the precarious is defined as a state of intensified uncertainty inasmuch as it threatens personal existence within a socio-economical context marked by instability. As such, fleetingness becomes its modality of instrumental action. Simone has also identified an experience of precariousness in the urban South whereby emergency pervades every horizon of expectation. Therefore, inasmuch as uncertainty and emergency enfold the precarious subjects’ experiential horizons, the state of precarious crisis acts as an axis around which embodied practices in the urban life may fluctuate.

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At the same time, emergency describes a process of things in the making, of the emergence of new thinking and practice still unstable, still tentative in terms of the use to which such thinking and practice will be put. This is a present, then, able to seemingly absorb any innovation or experiment; a temporality characterized by a lack of gravity that would hold meanings to specific expressions and actions. There are no bearings and disorientation is guaranteed. (Simone, 2004, p. 4; emphasis added) It accounts for forms of action and intellection, embodiments and imaginaries that are projected within a temporal urban frame. Faced with experiences of uncertainty and emergency jeopardizing their everyday existence, urban inhabitants might undertake constantly fluctuating practices to deal with such threats. In doing so, they embody a wide range of rhythms, that is, practices in terms of dynamics that produce time. Among them we can find acceleration: a lack of time to trace out enduring chains of causation may force urban subjects to steadily re-interpret their practices. Also waiting: in a wide sense of states of being, from disciplinary to submissive states that are eventually critical to survive within the logic of the everyday field (Simone, 2019a, pp. 4–6). Put it in other terms, precarious trajectories are situated within reduced horizons that condemned all experience to a sense of permanence; a permanence within which long-term future perspectives are substituted by a frantic compulsion to act, to escape and be saved. However, urban subjects dwelling under the pressure of precarity might have room to deploy temporal articulations of expectation and aspiration. Simone has coined the notion of “rhythms of endurance” to conceptualize practices, indefinite social ensembles and modes of intellection that may arise from urban places of crisis: This is a rhythm of endurance, of surging forward and withdrawing. It is not a rhythm of endless becoming nor of staying put; it is making the most of the ‘hinge,’ of knowing how to move and think through various angles while being fully aware of the constraints, the durability of those things that are ‘bad for us’ [Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times]. (2019b p. 8) This conceptual category is useful to understand what some contemporary films in Latin America model in through aesthetic devices: that is, the maximizing of resources, unexpected and experimental connections with the urban environment, ensembles between people and things. This experimental character of making unexpected connections in order to cope with toxic temporalities of the city (from the traumatic past and its mental and bodily wounds to the scarcity future referents) could be considered a treat of an

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experience of the urban south – especially when it comes about to gain an insight on those community of subjects who are seemingly at the margins of urban developmental or cosmopolitan projects. The Wanderer’s Shadow (Ciro Guerra, 2004): Bodies of Memory and Precariousness: The Figures of Coloniality and the Temporal Dynamics of Uncertainty

These ideas revolving around the multiple forms of conceiving and embodying memory and precarious temporalities can be perceived and conceptualized in the films that my analysis addresses. Both The Wanderer’s Shadow and The Stoplight Society evince entangled urban temporalities that I have just explained. They contribute to this reflection on urban subjects and their temporal experience by intertwining various aesthetic means. All of them coincide in that they articulate a film aesthetic that revisits Glauber Rocha’s “aesthetic of dreaming” (Rocha & Xavier, 2011). In 1971, and within the context of the New Latin American Cinema, the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha claimed that “revolutionary cinema” acts not only as an immediately political means, but also as a mode of arousing sensitizing thinking. One can infer from Rocha’s aesthetic manifesto the idea that neither rationalist logics nor quantitative explanations, which for him stand for a by-product of colonialism, are able to capture the experience of the poor. Thus, only the modes of seeing and feeling belonging to popular cultures (mysticism, irrationality, dreams) could engage with experiences of incoherence and uncertainty. Guerra’s and Mendoza’s works implicitly refer back to this tradition within the Latin American cinema. On the other hand, much of this is tied up with the way in which these films construct their characters. These are subjects informed by the constrictions of their social urban environment as much as by their body-mind restrictions. German film scholar Thomas Elsaesser identified this property in different contemporary films from the world cinemas – which reveals the global interrelation with which these films are entangled: [A] point of view … a portal or entry point that no longer takes for granted the centrality of the human agent, her position in Euclidean space, and her sense-perceptions as reference base or normative default value. Instead, characters’ actions, narrative spaces, and dramatic situations challenge the spectator’s ‘suspension of disbelief’, by featuring protagonists whose view of the world is different, that is, marked by limits placed on their physical or mental faculties: restrictions, which, however, turn out to be enabling conditions in some other register. I am thinking of characters who suffer from, or display certain ‘conditions’, such as schizophrenia, amnesia, paralysis, who are pathologically violent, or traumatically mute, who are

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blind, possess extrasensory faculties, or give themselves over to obsessions, whose sense of taste or of smell is hyper-developed, who think they can make themselves invisible, or can time-travel, or who are recovering from a mortal illness or not recovering from trauma. (2009, p. 9) This property is present in Guerra’s and Mendoza’s films in order to arrange new vantage points, modes subjectivities and temporalities which, despite its precarious state, generate new vantage points and forms of being in the city. The Wanderer’s Shadow (La sombra del caminante, 2004) was the first length-feature of the Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra. He is mostly known by his films The Wind Journeys (Los viajes del viento 2009), Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente, 2015), nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, and Birds of Passage (Pajaros de verano, 2018), nominated and awarded at European film festivals like Cannes. The film centres on the peculiar friendship between Mañe (César Badillo), a disabled and jobless man who is constantly abused by his neighbours and who tries to make a living out of selling origami figures on the streets, and Mansalva (Ignacio Prieto) a silletero (“chair-man”), a man who carries persons on a chair bound on his back for 500 pesos. Both characters live in such an asphyxiating precarious situation to the point that they have to move constantly through Bogotá’s downtown streets in order to grasp any opportunity to survive. Guerra’s film depicts Bogotá as an urban space permeated by experiences of national social crisis and the uncertainties of poor urban classes. Furthermore, these circumstances overlap with a nearly all-pervading experience: the violence of Colombian armed conflict taking place outside the capital city. In this regard, we observe that the film models multiple forms of violence that both protagonists have to withstand. On the one hand, all main characters in the film have some sort of physical incapacities, their bodies were damaged because of the armed conflict. On the other, although Mañe and the silletero build a friendship by helping each other, they eventually realize they have a common past linking dramatically their own past experiences – Mansalva was involved in the assassination of Mañe’s family. The Wanderer’s Shadow, thus, is one of the films leading a compelling group of contemporary Colombian movies that have profoundly been engaging with the consequences of the armed conflict over the last decades. Some aspects of The Wanderer’s Shadow might in fact be representative to this group of contemporary films. One the one hand, Guerra’s film proffers a careful approach to the image of violence victims, trying to trigger in the spectator a reflection on the memory of conflict through subjective film constructions, at odds with other kinds of fetishization of the images of violence. On the other hand, the The Wanderer’s Shadow, as we will realize, engages with image of the city and its urban experience with the purpose of taking apart a homogeneous time of

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the national to the extent that it focusses on the multiple rhythms of precariousness and temporal articulations that inflect the lives of the characters. Precarious Urban Subjectivity: Inertias and Rhythms of Emergency

The film’s opening sections present its thematic and formal prerogatives. One of the overarching motifs initiated by this opening sequence concerns the precarious forms of being in the city. After the enigmatic man’s first appearance in Bogotá’s central streets, we see that he puts on his neck a sign, “Pasaje $50” (Ride: $50), offering to carry passers-by to their destination on a chair attached to his back (00:3:08). Here, the mise-en-scène of the character’s movement defamiliarizes the whole image of everyday street life, because a panoramic shot lets us compare the forced walk of the character with the natural rhythm of the other passers-by. After this, the camera shows us detailed shots of merchandise offered on the street, like glasses, compact discs – all of which are distinctive of Bogotá’s informal economy. We perceive all these images through point-of-view shots of the character. They also are handheld camera takes, so they produce unsteady frame movements that reify the hustle and bustle of the street, a texture on the screen that incarnates real bodily transitivity. What is distinctive about this segment is a fast cutting that gradually fragments the subject by resorting to various types of shots: long shots are followed by close-ups, letting us see one part of the character’s face and finally the detailed shots of merchandise. Since the camera refuses to present the subject’s body within his space composition, we can only focus on the accumulative and jumpy effect of detailed shots of merchandise, passing one after the other. Therefore, kinesic dimensions of mise-en-scène, shot composition and editing rhythm configure together two types of times: namely, the inertia of the character’s pace amid the urban crowd and, at the same time, the hasty experience of informal sellers that he observes. On the other hand, sound plays also an important role here. The sequence is far from unfolding a documentary-like “effect of the real” because the diegetic soundtrack (i.e., the urban soundscape from the street) is overlaid with an enigmatic and obscure non-diegetic sound effect. One can say that the sound editing functions as a baffling effect which marks the affective interface to the image of the city. That is to say, this sensory sound effect is also part of the fragmentary filmic construction of the body we have observed before. I argue that these camera patterns initiate what I refer to as an aesthetic of precariousness. The aesthetic of precariousness is refracted in various layers of the film’s style and narrative, all of which attempt to embody an urban experience characterized by emergency and uncertainty. This is integrated in all those sequences in which Mañe and Mansalva attempt to move through the streets in order to transact any business to earn some money. Here the situations concentrate a lot of movements of shot composition and rhythm of

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cutting which eventually do not lead anywhere. In narrative terms, their agentic actions are always suspended; they do not have any effect. We are just left with a continuous sense of incompleteness. Embodying the Long Durée of Coloniality

When asked in an interview about the character of Mansalva, Ciro Guerra – who comes from the Atlantic region outside Bogotá – admitted that it was actually a childhood image, when he saw occasionally silleteros transporting people from one riverside to the other (Moreno Sarmiento, 2018). The director’s iconographic composition of the silletero is based on a popular visual image related to cargueros (“carriers”). The cargueros were persons used as a vehicle to transport travellers across rough terrains in some Colombian regions. They became a popular visual motif whose activity depicts subaltern subjectivities and relations of power arising from colonial and post-colonial times. The first illustrations of carriers’ activity date back to the nineteenth century. They appear, thus, at the beginning of Colombia’s establishment as a republic. The national discourse included, among other things, illustrations to develop a cartographic knowledge of space. Images like the watercolour Camino a Nóvita en la montaña de Tamaná (1853) are part of one of the most ambitious cartographic projects, the so-called Comisión Corográfica (Chorographic Commission), carried out around 1850–1859 as a way to map the territory of the newborn Colombian nation. The watercolour pictures of the Commission’s national project make manifest that the making of the national map was (literally) supported by the carriers’ physical practices (Urueña, 2018, 67–68). As a visual character, the carrier is depicted in the watercolour Camino a Nóvita as a mere colonized human vehicle devoid of clothing —so that they are exoticized as salvajes (“savages”). They are represented as walkers linked to an unknown terrain that awaits rationalization. Thus, they serve national progress, embodied in a lettered person in western attire (see Applebaum, 2017). Anthropologist Michael Taussig also devotes an insightful analysis to the Chorographic Commission. He contends that it represents a national geographic project with a view to the colonialization of space (Taussig, 2004, p. 197). Concerning the intricate colonial relationship that cartographers and others had with the cargueros, Taussig explains in My Cocaine Museum: This sense of stillness in the landscape as you move across it can be abruptly reversed. For sometimes looking out the window of a train or of a car, you may think you are still, and it is the landscape that is moving instead. This happens more frequently to people who are not used to trains or automobiles. Such may have been the illusion of a suspended sense of

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stasis of the chorographic commissioners as they lurched over the cordilleras carried on the backs of their peons knee-deep in mud. Having reified nature into numbers and tables, having gotten it figured as a map, the tables and the maps take on a life of their own and start to move. This must be why we love maps. The important thing here is the scissors movement between one’s body and what one’s body—or rather, that of the peon carrying you—is moving across. Just as a skilled butcher finds the natural cleavage points, so the skilled chorographers of the commission butchered the carcass of the nation, finding the routes cut into nature by nature along which goods and humans flowed. For it is transport that underlies the map; transport in the sense of being carried across that which you objectify, and transport in the sense that this became pretty much the main preoccupation of the commission, concerned with roads, tracks, and rivers not only as the vital arteries of commerce but as the articulation of a nation. (2004, pp. 200–201) The fact that Taussig depicts the context of those still representations in terms of being moved by carriers, namely, in terms of acceleration and stasis, helps us to understand the visual shift that the contemporary The Wanderer’s Shadow carries out. As figures present in the visual culture of Colombian history, these subaltern-colonial subjects and figures formed part of an embodied ancestral knowledge of nature, as described by Taussig. If we conceive of them in this context, one could say they are representative of the countryside. A visual archeology of this figure reveals that the cargueros subscribe to the countryside imaginary, which involves as such a time-space coordinate different from those in the urban space. As those images from the nineteenth century depict, the cartographic illustrated project spatialized nature upon their shoulders. Taking this into account, one can contend that the film’s temporal figuration might be described as an aesthetic strategy whereby the film represents a turn of phrase. That is to say, it undertakes a temporal translation into the film medium with respect to the visual history of the national. In this sense, the figure of the silletero as filmic construction works as a subaltern subject because he is a refugee in the city who flees the armed conflict in the countryside and has been absorbed by the urban logic of precariousness. Therefore, although the figure has suffered a mediated reconversion – from a national cartographic imaginary to contemporary film urban imaginary – its temporal past horizon persists, with the result that it is entangled within the violent rhythm of an urban context. That is to say, it becomes a temporal regime in which the carrier has to support permanently on his own body the whole weight of precariousness. One could also affirm that the film’s silletero implies not only an urban body wherein the tedious permanence of precariousness is incarnated.

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Rather, it could also be conceived of in virtue of a filmic body displayed in parallel with a long durée – that of colonized spaced and corporeal subjugation – which reverberates with the colonization of nature and countryside by the nation-state. Crafting Film Genres for An Aesthetic of Precariousness: Experimental Alignments

In the opening part of The Wanderer’s Shadow, the film (00:4:39) introduces Mañe, the other main character in the film. A close-up displays origami figures next to an artificial limb. Mañe prays to a little figure of the holy Virgin Mary: “Enlighten us today, because tomorrow we might not be alive.”2 The following scenes depict in general his everyday constraints as a jobless person who has a disability. Such pressing situations entail a series of anguishing journeys through different urban scenarios that Mañe has to get through. The staging of the bodily performance, which contrasts with the everyday rhythm of the urban crowd, underlines hectic rhythms and gestures while he walks through the hostile city. We can notice that the camera sets out the same splitting framing patterns through which we observe Mansalva for the first time: for instance, the detailed shots of Mañe’s feet as he is hobbling. The outcome of such composition is that it enhances the character’s dislocating experience of urban circulation – a motion that fragments the character’s experience. The resolution of these dramatic and dynamic scenes appears in the image of Mañe standing alone in the square, an image that models a static state of being and the experience of waiting. However, while all these setups embody the same time of inertia and emergence I point out above, this sequence introduces another motif, a twist of temporal perspective. A gang of young men bullies Mañe as is hobbling through the neighbourhood’s streets. Here and in later sequences, when the violent gang threats and beats Mañe to rob him, Mansalva appears suddenly to defend the disabled character against them. At the same time, this action triggers a chain of mutual favours. Mañe also helps Mansalva to learn to write and read and, in another sequence, he makes a deal with the police officers so that they give Mansalva his chair or work tool back. In all of these situations the film rearranges the story and plot following a clear dramatic line of conflict and visual parameters of the western genre. First, there is a tripartite pattern of drama and conflict where a taciturn, enigmatic hero (Mansalva) confronts the “savages” or “outlaws” (gang of young people) in order to help or rescue a weak townsman (Mañe) within a hostile social order (the city) (Cawelti, 1999, pp. 29–37). In this sense, by bringing in the film genre economy of the western, Guerra’s film introduces an explicit structure of values, morals and actions. This is a Manichean structure of ideas where the hero’s actions and views are premised upon a notion of moral

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justice, one which confronts social disorder or corruption. André Bazin described such a structure of ideas in this way: It is the morality of a world in which social good and evil, in their simplicity and necessity, exist like two primary and basic elements. But good in its natal state engenders law in all its primitive rigor; epic becomes tragedy, on the appearance of the first conflict between the transcendence of social justice and the individual character of moral justice, between the categorical imperative of the law which guarantees the order of the future city, and the no less unshakeable order of the individual conscience. (2005, p. 147) The Wanderer’s Shadows resorts to this mythological structure but not without re-assembling it into the context of the urban south and precarious subjects. Indeed, the director is aware of the Hollywood genre and its ideological restraints, but he does not seem to limit this adaptation to a simple parody. I would like to argue that this re-assemblage and crafting of a classic genre have a few aesthetic consequences for how the film conceptualizes the temporality of precarious subjectivities. First, in those scenes of action in which Mansalva rushes to rescue the defenceless Mañe, the film passes from a state of inertia and uncertainty, as explained above, to a form of agency: the overcoming of the toxic constraints of the city. One could pinpoint this conversion by drawing on Deleuze’s cinematic time concepts (2007). Thus, the passage constitutes a change from the disrupted sensorimotor schema (the inertia we observed at the beginning, with a style of disconnected images of street experience) towards a re-boosting of the same vulnerable schema (making the choice of going to the aid of a hopeless person). Second, the forms of moral actions in some narrative structures of the western are organized around the act an “individual conscience”. However, when deriving from this narrative unity of action, The Wanderer’s Shadow romanticizes neither the character nor the environment. On the contrary, Mansalva’s and Mañe’s forms of agency are non-individual. They presuppose a social alignment between subjects. Now, this social link is unstable and experimental. While they help each other to surmount their respective constrictions of poverty, disabilities and external menacing forces, these recurrent unities of action (conflict/resolution) are brought to their radical and experimental consequences. That is, when they gradually realize that, in the midst of the violent conflict, Mansalva was involved in the murder of Mañe’s family, this ethical mutuality reaches a critical point: does he deserve to be forgiven? Can they still support each other in their mutual adversity? These fluctuations of the characters’ actions, I argue, illustrate and contribute to the idea of rhythm or time of endurance and temporary social alignments (Simone, 2019b) that I described above. While they go forward in an

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audacious way, the situation makes them appear aware of their precarious and temporary movements. Finally, this form of agency is also anti-heroic because they overcome a conflict only temporarily. If there is no conflict between them and the gang of young men, it is the corrupt police officers who forbid them to try to make a living at the streets. What I signal as the recomposition of the disrupted sensorimotor schema is something temporary, precarious and fragile. A formal foundation of this anti-heroic aspect is the film’s work with long shots and depth of field. An overarching aspect of classic westerns, for example in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (John Ford, 1962, USA), just to mention one among many, is the use of setups of shots which revolve around open horizons. This contributes to the arrangement of actions towards an epic conflict between the hero and nature (Bazin et al., 2005, p. 147). Although The Wanderer’s Shadow resorts to this type of shot composition, this is readapted to model an anti-heroic figure. In Guerra’s film, the style insists on arranging the mise-en-scène of bodily performances (two disabled characters walking, moving with difficulty) in relation to an adverse urban environment. The couple appear either against the background plane of the indifferent city’s crowd walking through Bogotá’s downtown or against long modern avenues. Thus, the depth-of-field does not operate as an enhancer of epic action (classic western), but constitutes a precarious form of action and resistance against the antagonistic environment. On the other hand, at the moment the gang confronts Mansalva, the camera adopts a shot/reverse-shot technique. It also relies on a depth-of-field composition (Mansalva’s head at the bottom of the frame looking at the group of young men standing on the focussed background, and then the other way around). It enhances the experience of conflicting time-space and sets out figurative characters distinguished as either good or bad. Affective Embodiment of Trauma and the Healing

The tangible vestiges of past violence in the urban present become manifest precisely in the characters’ bodies. As corporeal witness to the conflictviolence, the wounds are inscribed both in the film’s mutilated bodies as well as fragmented psyches. Those wounds, moreover, are interwoven with the film’s urban rhythms. A thought-provoking sequence is that in which Mansalva meets Mañe on a bench. Mañe admits that he talked with a corrupt police officer and made a deal so that his friend could retrieve his chair, which had been confiscated in a police raid. He also got him a license that allows him to keep working on the streets – since Mansalva cannot read, Mañe reads out the content of the license. But Mañe has been drinking a strange potion prepared by his street comrade. The brew seems to have some odd effects on him. We look at the street from the character’s point of

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perception: a shot with blurring slowed-down movement distortion along with a distorted voice. The camera cuts first to a close-up of Mañe’s face, and then to a shot of the sky in which the movement of clouds is accelerated. A detailed shot of Mañe’s eye dissolves in a tracking and perpendicular shot that moves close to Mañe, completely under the effects of the mysterious potion. The shot keeps tracking over paving stones, as we listen to an enigmatic soundtrack overlapping between loud sounds of rain and thunder. After some sparkles of light, the moving camera shifts to another time-space configuration. Now, the shot’s durational rhythm is stretched. We still hear the non-diegetic soundtrack of the rain and enigmatic sound effects as the camera moves close to the surface of a roadway. Bullet shells, a gun and an arm covered with blood appear on the screen. The moment the camera slowly turns to a straight angle, we see Mañe walking without his crutch, putting his arms up under the rain. From a close-up of Mañe’s face in slow motion, the camera cuts once again to the overcast sky. Finally, we observe an intense sparkle of white light on his face, and at once a high-pitched enigmatic noise. The camera comes back after that to the original scene on the park bench. Because of its intense durational effect, the filmic configuration of this long take underlines a filmic temporality premised on haptic means. Thus, the sequence should be read regarding an affective spectator’s response. According to Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological approach to cinematic experience, an intersubjective space unfolds between film and spectator in such a way that they both engage with each other by means of an embodied and performative address. Thus, the film’s perceptual expression might engage with the spectator through a haptic visuality, that is to say, through tactility and other bodily senses. In Sobchack’s words: “the film experience is a system of communication based on bodily perception as a vehicle of conscious expression. It entails the visible, audible, kinetic aspects of sensible experience to make sense visibly, audibly, and haptically” (1992, p. 9). Sobchack’s account of the perceptual functioning of the haptic can also be related to a notion of filmic temporality, inasmuch as the bodily sensorial experience present during the sequence incarnates a sense of remembrances. I argue that such temporal strategy of remembrance consists of an affective mechanism that drives (more than enacts) a reflection on traumatic memory. In this respect, Jill Bennett’s work on the visual culture of trauma offers a way to conceptualize the performance of affect within and through some works of art that engage with the dissociative dimension of trauma. To give an account of the way works of art manage to think trauma through affective engagement, Bennett draws on Deleuze’s early concept of “encountered sign”, which he developed in Proust and Signs. An encountered sign delineates that which is apprehended through feelings – the realm of sensorial – rather than being recognized or perceived through cognition. But this first aspect has a further argumentative consequence: the sensorial is not an end

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in itself, since the feeling works as an activator or drive to critical inquiry or deep thought: “More important than thought there is ‘what leads to thought’ … impressions which force us to look, encounters which force us to interpret, expressions which force us to think” (Deleuze & Howard, 2014, p. 95; Bennett, 2005, p. 7). The long take arguably opens up a filmic haptic temporality that models an affectively covered remembrance of a past scene. Since we cannot identify any specific representation of location and time in this sequence, we can only perceive by focusing attention on the enigmatic and frightening dimension. As regards the aesthetic work on memory, this embodiment of affects prompts a reflection on the distressing consequence of the violence that the film’s subjects suffered in the past. The film’s engagement with the traumatic is a starting point to encourage a temporal reflection and, thus, to break away from the immediate present and repetition, as Pécaut’s analysis points out. With this aesthetic link between expressive force and interpretation of time, the haptic visuality The Wanderer’s Shadow seeks for a re-orientation of filmic aesthetic experimentation towards an involvement with the work of memory. The Stoplight Society (Rubén Mendoza, 2010): Objects, Social Ensembles and Endurance

The Stoplight Society (La sociedad del semáforo, 2010) is the first feature-length film directed by Rubén Mendoza. Raúl, the film’s main character, tries to make a living on Bogotá’s streets, running away from the violence that harassed him at home. He spends his time picking up papers, cans, scraps and all kind of old objects. He also possesses a great ability to engineer and repair electronic mechanisms as well as to improvise new devices. Taking advantage of this gift, he tries to persuade a group of beggars and street artists that he could hack the traffic light around which they usually perform. If he achieves this goal, the traffic light would stop at red twenty seconds longer, and they would get more time to collect money from the drivers. But in the course of the plan, Raúl and his associates have to confront police violence, addictions and the toxic urban environments. The film works with people who are not actors. In analysing Mendoza’s film, I attempt to flesh out the notion of endurance as modelled by a cinematic image of the city and following Simone’s conceptualization of “rhythms of endurance” elaborated above. This is what this film shares with The Wanderer’s Shadow – namely, a rhythm that goes forward in search of a better life, out of the toxic environment. As we realize later in the film, the configuration of the character’s body rotates with respect to at least two filmic axes of temporalities. From one point of view, there is a temporality that bears on the experience of the past – a traumatic one that

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appears in an allegorical and dissociative form in the actual state of affairs. From the other, there is the present temporality the characters embody, that concerns the rhythms of endurance that help them live within urban adversity. It brings together their immediate future characterised by uncertainty and volatility, their makeshift counter practices over urban regimes of time (the indifferent flux of cars driving over the traffic light), and their need to confront the pervasive experience of death and violence (the police officers who hinder their activities and attempt against their lives). The Grotesque Experience of the City

The establishing sequence buttresses the conjunction between the rhythmical dimension of the city and the character’s perception of himself in the city. The sequence begins with a distinguishing feature of urban cinema: a long-shot over Bogotá’s panoramic skyline lit up by night. The camera cuts to an abruptly contrasting scene in which we see a great number of ambulances in a traffic jam on an avenue with a soundtrack of sirens. A sense of monumental blockage is stressed by tracking shots moving through the street and over the ambulances. Zooms and long shots show the bizarre image of several ambulances stranded in traffic. While an aerial tracking shot from a vertiginous angle makes us look down at two ambulances blocking each other, the camera cuts, again abruptly, to a detail shot of Raúl’s dirty hands. At this point, we realize that he is engrossed in his hands, emulating with them the traffic jam of ambulances while he imitates the siren sounds. After that, a deep-focus frame lets us look at the urban space composition that reveals Raúl’s marginal condition. The shot unfolds a contrast between bodily movements, inserted into the distinct planes of depth. Whereas the urban figures in the background (cars and persons walking through the street) keep moving, in the middle ground Raúl and other beggars are surrounded by their bags of scrap and maintain a position of stasis. We may pinpoint here one of Mendoza’s engagements with film style and temporality. There are scenes which unfold oneiric depictions (like this one representing the ambulances). Although they belong to a dream-like world, they have their own chain of causation; this is what makes them readable, what allows us to infer from it concept or idea related to characters’ inaction and experience of inertia. Furthermore, these types of scenes pop up and interrupt the course of narrative events; then, they cut to the point of view of Raúl. The ambulance scene embodies a sort of oneiric depiction related to Raúl’s view – or rather, to his state of mind affected by psychotropic drugs, as we will discover later. The match-cut between Raúl’s dirty hands and the image of blocked circulation invites us to reflect on how the city is figured. In this sense, the matchcut sets up a conceptual strategy of montage which debunks an image of the

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city as national symbol. The scene of ambulances rushing with loud sirens may set into relief an allegorical reference to death. Furthermore, the images bear a certain sense of “grotesque excessiveness” (Edwards & Graulund, 2013) as much as a figurative sense of paralysis and disrupted circulation. Given that all these bearings are embedded in the urban location of Bogotá, one can assert that the scene incarnates a contesting allegory of the national. The features of urban cinema that model the image of the national (see Jáuregui & Suárez, 2002), such as the skyline setting and monumental long shots, are contested to the extent that they lose their logic of totality and social uniformity. Now they appear as images of the marginal, images of the experience of ill-being which escapes any homogeneous depiction of reality. Much the same as the hallucinatory and haptic long take we observed in The Wanderer’s Shadow, The Stoplight Society engages with an audiovisual discourse shaping a vicarious experience of violence and past trauma. Here, the film’s segments of a dream-like world appear again. For instances, before Raúl sets out to solder the artefact that will purportedly stop the traffic lights, the camera arranges a series of detail shots depicting anew Raúl’s hands. He prepares a drug dose just as skilfully as he handles and rearranges his selfmade devices. The sequence displays then an editing of shots that suspends their spatial-temporal cohering relationship. A puzzling and ambiguous meaning emerges from those locations and their editing relationship. First, we see how Raúl performs and parodies a political meeting in front of a group of black kids at the street. Afterwards, we see Raúl smoking and staring at a building complex in ruins from another abandoned building. Then a close-up of what might be his feet at the shore of a sea —probably his homeland, which he was forced to leave as consequence of the armed conflict. Clearly, the de-associating editing effect lays bare a correlation between the character’s toxic world, incarnated in the urban ruins, and the image of hopelessness. But the film seems also to resort to these hallucinatory ruptures with the purpose of enacting fragments of a past. As in The Wanderer’s Shadow, the spectator never has any access to direct past images. Instead, the film unfolds visual correlatives of the pervasive violence conveyed by urban images from marginal places in Bogotá in a nightmarish way. Such strategies of addressing subjectivity by means of discontinuous editing and narratives keep with dissociating aspects of trauma that aim at raising reflection. Engineering New Object Connections

The detailed motif of Raúl’s hands sets out a further rhythmical and narrative pattern from which the temporal dimension of endurance and craftsmanship emerges. One of the opening scenes (00:3:36) depicts the slum that Raúl lives in with a manipulation and re-assemblage of objects. Around Raúl’s shanty, we observe various kinds of residual materials such as plastic or scrap. A

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long-shot takes us inside and allows us to observe Raúl in the middle of a slightly dark composition while different kinds of objects surround him. The moment he stands up and switches a light on, the shot turns to a close-up to show us Raúl’s hand anew holding one of those objects. Just at this point, the scene sets up a soundtrack, a sort of multi-chromatic melody: an enigmatic rhythm evoking the atmosphere of acrobatic performances. After that, Raúl sits at a desk full of sketches, designs and drawings. We can also see a mock-up of what seems to be a street segment. A close-up shot focuses on the artefacts and objects collected on the table, such as several kinds of watches and timing devices and finally drugs and trash. The close-up also shows Raúl’s hands while he is handling the electric connections until the mock-up of the street segment gets lit up. Thereafter, the camera moves to various detail shots of the mock-up and then superimpositions of the images of sketches representing traffic lights from different perspectives. One can contend that such camera patterns that hinge on overlapping visual details of objects, artefacts and sketches give a body to the idea of the precarious, through the dexterous manipulation and re-assemblage of residual objects. By defamiliarizing the objects through detail shots, the scene seems to accentuate the craftsmanship value that objects as well as human assemblages achieve in the film. We can understand better the motivation and meaning of those images if we bring to the fore the essence of the material objects in the lives of the precarious social agents. Makeshift practices and aspirations of the rhythms of endurances take form through material things. In addition, this alternative use of residual objects and scraps operates in the way of temporal rearrangers. That is to say, the building of a mock-up and the various sketches of bodies, represented around the traffic light, aspire to short-circuit a representational urban regime of time such as the stoplight. As we realize later, such short-circuiting of time is carried out by a sort of bodily platform, a well-planned and alternatively synchronised bodily performance that emerges in-between the momentary short-circuiting of an urban regime of time. Social Ensembles That Short-Circuit the Rhythm of the City

This embodiment of endurance is exactly what the following sequence comes to be associated with (00:07:05). In this case, the film unfolds other perceptual means in order to draw our attention to the urban bodies of the beggars and street artists. Raúl tries to bring the boss of the street artist, Cien Fuegos (“Hundred fires”), around to the idea that if he manages to hack the traffic lights, as he has been planning, the cars will have to stop at the red traffic light twenty seconds longer. If that happens, the community of street artists and beggars have the chance to beg and collect more money. As Raúl – or the “poet of the cables” as one of the street performers refers to him – claims:

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“Mr. Hundred Fires, the traffic lights are like a monster with three eyes. But it can also become a tray with three plates.”3 The scenes depicting the traffic lights in the centre of Bogotá function in general as a dramatic setting for the narration. But, above all, they carve out distinct modes of inhabiting and surviving the urban as well as dealing with time in different ways. First of all, the traffic light embodies a temporal motif, an artefact that marks a time regime of everyday life. But it inflects a regime of time within the city whose “dead times” (on the red light) are used by the band of street artists as sporadic chances for improvisation. At the beginning of the film, the first of the stoplight scenes displays the way in which Raúl surveys and measures how the band of street artists makes do, performing and taking advantage of those “dead moments” of the traffic circulation. Raúl approaches the crossroads of the traffic lights. The film introduces the setting by means of some open frames over a real location in Bogotá’s centre (Fourth Avenue). Raúl, staring at the performance from a corner, appears as measurer or analyser of the streets artists’ makeshift performances around the cars. The sequence is set up by a kind of multi-chromatic, syncopated and dissociating soundtrack music. Its motivation revolves around its coloured rhythmicity, which enfolds the editing rhythm in the same way as the rhythm of the mise-en-scène composed by dissimilar camera movements such as tilts, pans, forwards and backwards dollies, and distinct camera angles. Each of these seems to motivate the role of the artists: a group of young men building a human tower, women selling flowers, street poets, mimes, black rappers and a female juggler spitting fire from her mouth. This enfolding rhythm is also in time with their bodies’ frenzied movement on the street, contrasting with the static state of cars and drivers. A police patrol breaks up the collective performance. This forces the street artists to run away. The bodies on-screen, therefore, take on another rhythm, that of instability. Here the social mise-en-scène works as a temporalized pattern. Besides, the urban scene takes on a specific “temporal density” by means of the soundtrack.4 In the light of such attributes of shots, composition and sound, one can claim that the street artists are presented as a marginal community. However, they are able to confirm a form of agency in that they synchronize and assemble in the interstices of urban circulation, to which they attach and detach themselves. This dynamic of coupling and decoupling represents a temporal sense of endurance, since the precarious subjects act, creating improvised ensembles and deploying makeshift strategies and artefacts to move over an urban space and temporal flow that is averse to them. As a more or less stable entity, the group of street artists and beggars move forwards and backwards, entering the traffic as a divergent rhythmical time, to search for their profits and then move away, detaching themselves from that temporal flux. Scenes like this are rhythmically configured to shape how the socially improvised ensemble acts by virtue of temporary improvisations.

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Conclusion: A Film Aesthetic of/from the Global South

I believe that these particular films’ reflection on urban subjectivities and temporalities are relevant to the debate around a film aesthetic of the Global South. As we have seen, the film’s main assumption could be that social entities and urban materialities, which are considered as inoperative, may be reassembled. But this specific case in Colombian cities can be extrapolated to other places in Latin America and the Global South, as they also are represented in aesthetic terms. A common line in all these cases can be described through the experience and cognitive mechanisms of “dis-orientation” and “re-orientation”. These concepts may explain a treat shared by cities of the Global South, as K. Bystrom, A. Harris and J. Webber have recently remarked. Thus, this filmic premise I have just noted rests on an idea of: “the unstable, shifting ground that opens up when vantage points are challenged, geographical certainty fails and something new perhaps opens” (2018, p. 11). This perspective of an inventive recomposition of the urban subject is embedded on the films’ experimental features I have analysed. But to flesh out this concluding point, I would like to infer from my film analysis three properties which I consider may contribute to the understanding of a Southern film aesthetic. First of all, this is a film aesthetic that makes evident the filmmakers’ disposition of finding a way of expression which is fitted to articulate the unthinkable and grotesque of some experiences in the Global South. In my analysis of The Wanderer’s Shadow and The Stoplight Society, we see this arrangement of aesthetic, political and ethical terms to the extent that they engage with film devices that avoid parameters of continuity, verisimilitude or sheer indexicality. Instead, their images of emergency, inertias and toxicity have come under the scrutiny of a reflexive work. This is what we identify in the use of haptic visualities and the logic of dream-like worlds. As critics such as Hamid Naficy (2001) have demonstrated, it is not coincidence that a great part of the filmmakers who have developed multisensorial and reflexive film languages, “accented cinemas”, are artists who come from countries such Iran, Thailand, Argentina and Chile, among others. However, there is a second overarching aspect that characterizes a Southern film aesthetic. The social, mental and physical restrictions of the films’ characters, as explained before, turn out to produce generative capacities by which they re-orient themselves in the city. This, therefore, gives way to an aesthetic idea of plurality of reasons and forms of agency. In highlighting such vantage points, characters’ actions and time parameters, the films conceptualize forms of dealing with crisis which go beyond the depiction of subjects in classical dramaturgies. Finally, these two possible contributions for a Southern aesthetic rest on a third one concerning the geopolitics of aesthetics transfers and negotiations. In this sense, these filmmakers revisit some well-stablished

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cinematic genres, narratives and modes of expression in the world cinemas (like the classic western film genre). But their “Southern” contribution lies on the fact they readapt, or rather re-orient them, for their own aesthetic and political purposes, within the social realities of the Global South they experience and need to understand and convey. Notes 1 This and the following translations from Spanish into English are mine. “Me parece que el terror induce de manera progresiva efectos de fragilización de los territorios, hace estallar los referentes temporales, pone en peligro la posibilidad de los sujetos para afirmarse en medio de referentes contradictorios” (2001, p. 232). 2 “Iluminanos hoy que tal vez mañana ya no estemos.” 3 “Señor Cien Fuegos, el semáforo es un monstruo con tres ojos. Pero puede ser una bandeja con tres platos.” 4 I take this term from André Bazin’s “Monsier Hulot and Time” (2009). Here, he argues for an appreciation of the capacities of soundtrack music and sounds to infuse the images with “temporal density”.

Bibliography Albera, F. (2000) Mise en scène et rituels sociaux. In: Aumont, J. (ed.) La mise en scène, 1re éd. Bruxelles: De Boeck Université. Applebaum, N. (2017) Dibujar la nación. La Comisión Corográfica en la Colombia del siglo XIX. Bogotá: Univesidad de los Andes, FCE. Aumont, J. (ed.) (2000) La mise en scène. Bruxelles: De Boeck Université. Bazin, A. (2009) What is Cinema? Trans. by Timothy Barnard. Montreal: Caboose. Bazin, A. et al. (2005) What is cinema? Volume II. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, J. (2005) Empathic vision: Affect, trauma, and contemporary art. Stanford, California: Standford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998) Acts of resistance: Against the new myths of our time. Cambridge: Polity. Burkhardt, A. (2019) Kino in Kolumbien. Der innerkolumbianische Konflikt im Film zwischen Gewaltdiskurs und (trans-)nationaler Identität. Bielefeld: Transcript. Burucúa, C. & Sitnisky, C. (2018) The precarious in the cinemas of the Americas. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, J. (2006) Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London, New York: Verso. Bystrom, K., Harris, A. & Webber, A. (eds.) (2018) South and north: Contemporary urban orientations. London, New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Castells, M. (1998). End of millennium. vol. 3. the information age: Economy, society and culture. Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Cawelti, J. G. (1999) The six-gun mystique sequel. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Corrigan, T. & White, P. (2012) The film experience: An introduction. 3th edn. Boston: Bedford/St.Martins.

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Deleuze, G. & Howard, R. (2014) Proust and signs: The complete text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., Tomlinson, H. and Galeta, R. (2007, 1989) Cinema 2: the time image. 9th edn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edwards, J. D. & Graulund, R. (2013) The grotesque. London: Routledge. Elsaesser, T. (2009) World Cinema: Realism, Evidence, Presence. In: Nagib, L., Mello, C. (eds.) Realism and the audiovisual media. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3–19. Jáuregui, C. & Suárez, J. (2002) ‘Profilaxis, traducción y ética: la humanidad ‘desechable’ en Rodrigo D. No futuro, La vendedora de rosas y La virgen de los sicarios’, Revista Iberoamericana 68 (199), pp. 367–392. Kantaris, G. (2008) ‘El cine urbano y la tercera Violencia colombiana’ Revista Iberoamericana 74 (223), pp. 455–470. Martin, A. (2014) Mise en scène and film style: From classical Hollywood to new media art. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Martín-Barbero, J. (2001) Al sur de la modernidad. Comunicación, globalización y multiculturalidad. Pittsburg: Univ. Of Pittsburg. Medina, A. (Coord.) (1999) Arte y violencia en Colombia desde 1948. Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá. Bogotá: Norma. Mello, C. & Nagib, L. (2009) Realism and the audiovisual media. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Moreno Sarmiento, E. (2018) ‘Entrevista con Ciro Guerra, director de La sombra del caminante’. Available at: http://pantallacaci.com/ibermedia-digital/entrevistas/ ciro-guerra-en-san-sebastian/ (On February 2019) Naficy, H. (2001) An accented cinema: Exilic and diasporic filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Osorio Mejía, O. (2005) Comunicación, cine colombiano y ciudad. Medellín: Univ. Pontifía Bolivariana. Ospina, L. (2012) ‘A los hijos hay que reconocerlos. Notas sobre el montaje de La sociedad del semáforo’, Cinémas d’Amérique latine 20, pp. 70–81. Available at: http://journals.openedition.org/cinelatino/495. Viewed 28th October 2019. (On 28th October 2019) Palacios, M. (2012) Violencia pública en Colombia, 1958–2010. México D.F/Bogotá: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Pécaut, D. (2001) Guerra contra la sociedad, 1. ed. Bogotá: Editorial Planeta Colombiana. Pratt, G. & San Juan, R. M. (2014) Film and urban space. Critical possibilities. Edimburgh: Edimburgh Univ. Press. Rocha, G. & Xavier, I. (2011) La revolución es una eztétyka: Por un cine tropicalista. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. Rojas, C. (2002) Civilization and violence: Regimes of representation in nineteenth-century Colombia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rueda, M. H. (2018) The Politics of Precariousness and Resilience in Contemporary Colombian Films. In: Burucúa, C. & Sitnisky, C. (eds.) The precarious in the cinemas of the Americas. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Simone, A. M. (2004) For the city yet to come: Changing African life in four cities. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. (2019a) Precarious Detachment. ‘Youth and Modes of Operating in Hyderabad and Jakarta’, In: Low, S. M. (ed.) The Routledge handbook of anthropology and the city. London, New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 3–16.

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———. (2019b) Improvised lives: Rhythms of endurance in an urban South, First published. Cambridge, UK, Medford, MA: Polity. Sobchack, V. (1992) The address of the eye: A phenomenology of film experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. Suárez, J. (2010) Sitios de contienda: Producción cultural colombiana y el discurso de la violencia. Madrid, Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana; Vervuert. ———. (2012) Cinembargo Colombia: Critical essays on Colombian cinema and culture. Trans. by Laura Chesak. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Taussig, M. T. (2004) My cocaine museum. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Urueña, J. F. (2018) ‘La poética del ascenso y el descenso. Un montaje de dos variaciones en torno a imágenes de caminantes en Colombia’, Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología 33, pp. 61–78.

Filmography Guerra, C. (2004). La sombra del caminante (The Wanderer’s Shadow) Mendoza, R. (2009). La sociedad del semáforo (The Stoplight Society)

9 CINEMATICS OF SOUTHERN ENVIRONMENTALISM A. Chukwudumebi Obute

This chapter interrogates environmental practices in the Global South. Through an open analysis of Black November: Struggle for the Niger Delta (2012) and Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain (2014), it argues that motion pictures remain vital tools in framing the evolving environmental onslaught of neoliberal capitalism. It further employs both films to navigate the contested geography of the Global South. Against the vague spatial imagination of the south produced by western colonial epistemology, it explores the Indo-Nigerian nexus for the shared-cultural practices of resistance and resilience with regards to the devastation of petrocapitalism in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, and the lingering legacies of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. These encounters, I submit, provide a body of knowledge central to our grasp of present planetary crisis and additionally highlight the entry of necropolitics into environmental crisis. Cinema and the Global South

In Slums on the Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums (2016), Krstić observes that filmmakers with different concerns, north as well as south of the equator, have produced a vast amount of audiovisual material about the slums of New York, London or Paris in the early twentieth century, while today the focus is on Lagos, Rio de Janeiro or Mumbai. (p. 1) The scholar’s observation underpins the materiality of cinema beyond the imaginary borders of the so-called Global North. It further establishes the DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832-9

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corporeality of the natural environment in cinema, even though represented in its violated and pejorative form. This observation, therefore, expressly responds to one of the pivotal questions of this collection – ‘does a Global South cinema exist?’ Perhaps unintended, but equally evident in the scholar’s position, is an attempt at territorializing the contested geography of the Global South by fragmenting New York, London, Paris; and Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, and Mumbai into two separate temporal and spatial categories. The latter category currently constitutes what is referred to as the Global South – a conceptual reincarnation of the defunct Third World, and developing countries’ nomenclatures. It is also instructive to highlight that the constellation of Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, and Mumbai, as synecdoches for Africa, South America, and Asia into an “imagined community” of the Global South remains problematic and in dire need of geographic remapping, and reconceptualization (Anderson, 2006). I will focus on the environmental manifestation in cinema at this juncture and return to the cartographic concerns at a latter part of this chapter. The emergence of Euro-American cinematic focus on the slums of London, Paris and New York in the early twentieth century is, arguably, not unconnected to the toxic siege on the natural environment by the Industrial Revolution of the preceding century. Similarly, the current cinematic focus on slums across the imagined locale of the global south emerges as an emblem of the exploitation of the colonial project, the brutal force of neoliberalism and the modern commodification of the environment, leading to the ultimate depletion of these places. In The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Fanon observes that the natives’ quarter is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute – a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. It is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. (p. 39) While Fanon writes above within the context of the violence of the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries colonial project where economic inequalities pre-designed the habitation of the colonized people, a modern imagination of similar landscapes would project slums dispersed across the globe to the fore. For example, the infamous favelas of Rio de Janeiro today underscore the reproduction of these places of ill-fame, sustained by a colonial architecture of disproportionate economic disparities. Under the matrix of neoliberalism, slums have maintained their old significations of ill-fame, hunger, precariousness, and death. Moreover, they currently generate new

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forms of socio-political resistance across the south. We could, at this juncture, imagine geographic depletion in the aftermath of oil extraction in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria; Union Carbide’s pesticide hazard in Bhopal, India; and Vale’s destructive mining in Bento Rodriguez and Brumadinho, Brazil. In all of these instances, the promise of socio-economic progress has receded to the background and essentially given way to visions of environmental apocalypse. Indra Sinha, Pramod Nayar and Tanure Ojaide among other scholars have made significant efforts in literary and cultural criticism at foregrounding the Niger Delta and Bhopal’s environmental disasters. While the proliferation of modern slums in political and academic discourses could be linked to the failures of the colonial project and the disillusionment of postcolonial era, the interpretation of these signifiers of precariousness within the framework of environmental and cinematic aesthetics has not gained much attention. In this chapter therefore, I seek to expand the apparition of slums across the imagined spaces of the Global South in motion pictures, extending the tropes of environmental devastation beyond the postcolonial narrative, into the cascading ecological times. In view of this, I consider the following questions: how do we conceive and encapsulate the plurality, and entanglement of diverse cultural practices in a homogenized Global South? What are the dominant cinematic foci of this contested space, and how do they intervene in the face of multiple threats of environmental cataclysm? Rather than an ambitious promise of a grand narrative to produce definite answers to these questions, I propose new methods of considering the posed challenges through an environmentalist reading of Jeta Amata’s Black November: Struggle for the Niger Delta (2012) and a corroborating view from Kumar’s Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain (2014). In what follows, I use these audio-visual materials to finesse the rhetoric of the global south as a “sequestered space,” with a view to demonstrating my preference for what Menon proposes as “Afro-Asian affinities” (Menon, 2018). Cinematic (De)territorialization of the Global South

Figure 9.1 unveils a crowded market scene in the Niger Delta where traders improvise with trampoline and umbrellas as makeshift stores. The foggy atmosphere and faint appearance of residents attest to the history of environmental transformation in the region as the stack of yellow gas flare from oil corporations blend into the yellow sunset. This frame gradually fades into the bold sign of ‘Nigerian Prison Service, Warri Prison,’ (00:01:08) and further cuts into another scene of a hangman preparing the noose, and a priest waiting to witness an imminent execution (00:01:11) before the final cut, in this series, into yet another frame of the prison cell of Ebiere, the protagonist. These frames form a dialectical montage that present the habitation of the

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FIGURE 9.1 Establishing

shot of the Niger Delta (Black November, 00:00:59).

locals as a form of slum with all of its notoriety, where the congestion in Figure 9.1 finds a continuum in the incarceration of the protagonist in the prion. In other words, these opening frames (00:00:55 – 00:01:24) elicit an understanding of the region as an open-air prison, and the potential destruction of the incarcerated life by the authorities parallels the destructive force of slums. This comparison is corroborated by the impending execution of Ebiere at the hands of the hangman – a process aimed at cutting off the supply of oxygen to the vital organs of the human body. In addition, this also evokes the strategic implication of religion – the forerunner to the colonial project on the African continent – as a witness to the ongoing destruction, while distracting victims with the hope of eternal life. Although Figure 9.2 directly succeeds the series of frames following Figure 9.1, it however stages a contrast to the Niger Delta landscape. Through camera panning and aerial shots, viewers encounter the high-end properties of Los Angeles, America. The frames of skyscrapers, well-paved streets, endless fleets of vehicles, and other markers of modern progress in Los Angeles quickly turn into a scene of violence as a group of Niger Delta freedom fighters stage an accident scene. The ensuing confusion is mobilized by the group to kidnap Tom Hudson, the Managing Director of Western Oil. The insurrectionary team of Niger Delta – a cross-equator cast of Hollywood and Nollywood characters, including Enyinna Nwigwe, Razaaq Adoti, Akon, Wyclef Jean, Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, and a host of others, take the Chief Executive Office of Western Oil and some civilians hostage. The demand of the fighters is unequivocal – an immediate intervention by Western Oil to pressure the Nigerian government to call off the imminent execution of Ebiere revealed to us in the opening scene (00:01:27 – 00:07:30).

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FIGURE 9.2 Establishing

shot of Los Angeles (Black November, 00:01:27).

The visual contrast in Figures 9.1 and 9.2, character cast, and action in these opening scenes complicates the imagination and cartography of the global north and south. If anything, they irrefutably implicate the entanglement of the so-called north in the south, as the production of slums, suffering, and death in the south is perpetuated through the capitalist operations of northern actors. Buell argues that America’s conception of the physical environment in social and cultural discourse often manifests “as a production of geopolitics, capitalism, technology or other human institutions (2001, p. 31). While geopolitics demarcates the scenes of the Niger Delta and Los Angeles within a north/south binary, capitalism sanctions the environmental destruction of the south by the north, thus animating resistance as a push-back measure, an emerging characteristic of the south. Jeta Amata, a Nigerian immigrant to America and director of Black November (2012), likens his art to that of the insurrectionary team – as a protest against the unparalleled devastation of the biodiversity of the Niger Delta (Agina, 2018). In this guise, the cinema of the south journeys beyond conventional notions of entertainment as in comedies, and sheer imagination as in science fiction, to actively perform the idea of resistance from the global south. Hence, the geopolitical imagination of Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, and Mumbai, and the broader representation of Africa, Asia, and South America as the global south, appears problematic, when one considers north/south imbrication. Kumar’s Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain (2014) similarly complicates the imagined subjectivity of the global south as a distinct entity disconnected from the north. The historical drama, which relives the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, set in motion by the American pesticide firm Union Carbide, reinstates these complications with its settings. Its character cast also reflects the nature of the tragedy of international capital by moving across the equator to enlist Hollywood figures, such as Martin Sheen, Mischa Barton, Kal Penn

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alongside Bollywood’s Rajpal Yadav, Tannishtha Chatterjee, and Vineet Kumar. Scenes are dispersed across India and the United States. The opening scene unveils Union Carbide’s Headquarters in the United States of America, where Warren Anderson (the corporation’s CEO) appears troubled as he walks into his conference room, initiating the following dialogue with his assistant: Warren Anderson: Shane, any more news? Shane: Nothing sir. Warren Anderson: Right in the middle of that god-forsaken slum. Shane: Well, that’s the chief-minister’s problem, the slums shouldn’t be there (Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, 00:01:19) Anderson’s dialogue with Shane introduces Bhopal, Central India, with an aerial wide shot which captures the entire locale – a scene akin to the Fanonian thinking of the colonial slum, as a habitation “without spaciousness,” and its infamy (Fanon, 1963). The aerial wide shot strategically locates Union Carbide at the heart of Bhopal in a manner that equally suggests the economic and social dependency of the city on trans-national operations of global capitalism. The unmistakable toxic emission from Union Carbide’s factory into the biosphere of the city offers us, as audience, early warning to the gradual destruction of the environment and, equally, re-invents the Bhopal disaster of December 2 and 3, 1984. These opening scenes, with their spatial foci, are instructive for rethinking the idea of the global south in the context of modern environmental

FIGURE 9.3 Aerial

wide Shot of Bhopal (Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, 00:02:27).

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discourse. Elsaesser and Buckland suggest that “analyzing the opening scene is key to understanding any film,” stressing that, “the cues the first scene gives is not only useful in terms of content, they also set the tone in terms of form, structure and style” (2002, p. 172). The transition of the camera focus from Union Carbide’s Headquarters in America to Bhopal reiterates the position of Krstić in the introduction to this chapter: that of the modern cinematic focus on slums across the so-called south. However, it is imperative to depart from imagining the slums of Bhopal and the Niger Delta as geographically confined, and highlight that the economic disparities that produce these slums are common denominators across the equator. Deconstructing the territorial and national thinking of the global south, Kaltmeier argues that the gated cosmopolitan elites of Rio de Janeiro have more in common with the residents of Miami and Chicago than their nextdoor neighbors occupying the famous favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Of course, Kaltmeier’s suggested cultural alignment is foregrounded in the light of the materialist nexus of modernity and its corroborating index of culture capital. Similarly, Eriksen points to the sight of “lush oases of luxury alongside struggling lower-middle class life and plain hopelessness” in India. While Kenyans – who live in a country considered to be part of Global South – may contend that the idea of global south means little to them, Nigerians perhaps care even less about the emerging categorizations from the echo chambers of western epistemology (Global South Studies Center, (n.d.)). I have referenced the above to amplify the fluidity of the so-called global south, as it often appears as a largely open space, invoked and assigned identity within various contexts, and often influenced by power structures. Implicitly, it would be open to little contestation that to think of the Global South along nationalistic and specific territorial prisms would amount to a futile venture. Alternatively, Menon’s notion of “Afro-Asian affinities,” as bodies of knowledge “located in the lived histories as much as institutional and postcolonial developmental practices,” offers us pathways of thinking through the complexities of these “sequestered spaces” (p. 38). The quest to establish the ‘Other’ in the global north/south rhetoric, nonetheless, persists in cultural and spatial scholarship. Since this essay is not framed with a view to partially or fully engage with deterritorialization or reterritorialization, as the case may be, of the structural entailments of the contested space known as the global south, I shall apply the phrase with caution. In its stead, I adopt the idea of the Afro-Asian imagination, with a close focus on Nigeria on the African continent and India on the Asian continent. The Indo-Nigerian spatial alignment becomes useful for the purpose of this research for the shared experience of environmental devastation, resistance to global institutions that perpetuate environmental destruction, and resilience in the face of precarity. Secondly, the emergence of the Indian and Nigerian cinemas by 2015 as the two biggest cinemas in the world,

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by production, demonstrates the sizable potential of this nexus, and calls for an inquiry into the driving forces behind this cinematic explosion. Finally, given the shared cultural experiences of these spaces in the colonial project, a bridge across these spaces could bring to the fore the modes of resistance in the postcolony and add to the body of knowledge in confronting current environmental crisis. I explore these spatial affinities next. The Indo-Nigerian Landscape: Affinities of Resistance and Resilience

Black November: Struggle for the Niger Delta (2012) and Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain (2014), the objects of the environmental thrust of this essay, fall within the boundaries of what I consider the Indo-Nigerian cinematic space. I imagine this space as an audio-visual terrestrial one, characterized by an engagement with all-encompassing socio-cultural experiences, where actions are conceived predominantly through native thoughts and executed using local settings, aesthetics, and characters. Both films, released within the last decade, engage with and respond to the pervasive culture of transnational capitalism and the complicit engagement of local actors in exacerbating the dire environmental situation. While Black November takes on the ruins, produced by extraction of oil in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, presents the material destruction of human lives by the pesticide industry, rightly characterized by Carson as “biocides” (1962, p. 8). Carson’s re-imagination of the so-called pesticides as “biocides” foregrounds the biopolitical work of capitalism and science, as leading agents in the ongoing human and non-human destruction. The environmental thrust, human destruction across these settings, and the continuity of life in the face of these challenges, underline the shared human suffering across spaces throughout history. Citing Badejo (1989), Kura observes that the Indo-Nigerian affinity is one that dates back to the pre-independence Nigerian era, facilitated by the common colonial heritage of English Language, governmental procedures and a common history of anti-colonial struggles (2009, p. 2). Nigerian historians have repeatedly indexed the non-violent political approach of Gandhi in the liberation struggle of India as an exemplar for the Nigerian state in the agitation for political independence. The setting up of India’s Diplomatic House in Lagos in 1958 by the Indian state signaled the official flag-off of this trans-border relation. As the West Africa Pilot in 1942 observes: India has a special significance for the coloured members of the British Commonwealth[;] as such her fate in imperial politics means a lot to the coloured world undergoing British tutelage. The significance of this to Nigeria cannot be over-estimated because this dependency comes next to

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the Indian empire in size and population. If the deadlock in India could be successfully resolved by the British Government after many years, then a new era has dawned in British colonial policy. (Kura, 2009, pp. 2–3) Environmentally, both spaces ratified the Bale Convention of 1990, aimed at forestalling the export of toxic industries like Western Oil in Black November (2012) and hazardous materials like MIC in Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain in Nigeria and India respectively (cf. Kura 2009). Consequently, there is little doubt that the Indo-Nigerian affinity is deeply steeped in resistance to power structures like the British empire under the colonial project and the forces of capitalism in a neoliberal world. This shared culture has traveled through decades and recently sealed its place in motion pictures with the inauguration of the Indian Film Festival in Abuja in 2014, and the recent release of Namaste Wahala (2020). “The film, whose title translates in Hindi and Nigerian pidgin as ‘Hello Trouble’, tells the tale of a Nigerian woman who falls in love with an Indian investment banker living in Lagos. The young couple face a series of challenges – including their families – to be together” (Chile, 2021). The couple’s journey and their families’ opposition to their choices and subjectivity reflects the colonial oppression and denial of freedom to native voices. However, through resistance and resilience, they offer viewers an alternative to life in the face of opposition. I have briefly touched upon these instances of colonial, decolonial, and cinematic alliances to foreground the interaction between these spaces in forging ahead with life in a highly polarized world. Regardless of the IndoNigerian endorsement of the Bale Convention for the protection of human and natural environment, the insidious operation of global capitalism through local proxies and the principle of free market with limited government control have, nonetheless, thrown both spaces onto the war front of the modern planetary crisis. I return to the movies under review to strengthen the cinematic response of the Indo-Nigerian spaces. Reminiscent of the kangaroo trial and eventual execution of Ken SaroWiwa by the notorious regime of General Sani Abacha on November 10, 1995, Black November’s heroine, Ebiere, is executed for her opposition to the devastation of the biodiversity of her Niger Delta community by the collusion of Western Oil and the local political hegemony. The movie, however, exceeds the mere historicization of Saro-Wiwa’s persecution to provide an organic community response to the double-disaster of environmental destruction as well as the execution of the region’s voices of dissent. This organic response has manifested in the people’s resilience and adaptation to the changing conditions of their environment. The violent tone of the resistance in the Delta has steadily grabbed local and international attention and is a response to the ecological disasters that conceal the force of the spectacle. By

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‘force of the spectacle,’ I mean the absence of the explosive feel to the longterm effect of environmental havoc on the human and other ecological bodies. Krings and Okome imagine the Nigerian cinematic world, otherwise known as Nollywood, as the most visible form of cultural machine on the African continent, provoking its viewers to compare their own daily lives with what is presented on-screen. According to the authors, “in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa, for example, Nollywood has served as a model of filmic production and inspired growth of local film industries” (2013, p. 1). Additionally, Opeyemi pushes the argument about Nollywood beyond mere self-reflection as suggested by Krings and Okome, to stress that it is a portrayal of Nigerian society itself, that “has consistently told the story of the Nigerian state, society and people” (2008, p. 284). Onuzulike traces the origin of the industry to the legacies of colonialism, further stratifying the temporalities into “colonial period, Independence Period, Indigenization Decree Period, and the Nollywood period. The scholar claims Nigerian cinema began in August 1903, at the Glover Memorial Hall in Lagos” (2008, p. 25). It is observable that Nollywood stands at crossroads on the Black African continent as a visual empire of national and regional self-reflexivity, embodying the multiple durée of entangled temporalities on the continent. As a technology of cultural and transnational mobility, it also stages the distinctive cultural practices of the continent on the international stage. Modern technologies such as the internet, satellite television, and Netflix have been powerful avenues for the promotion and influence of Nollywood, both on and beyond the Continent. With the sweeping influence of Nollywood across the Black African continent, some ambitious critics have, in fact, been tempted to liken the industry to a ‘Pan-African movement.’ Caution must be exercised, lest we forcefully homogenize the cinemas of the African continent into Nollywood. This caution is useful because of the heterogenous nature of Nigerian society within which Nollywood has emerged. I have briefly branched off into the historicization of the Nigerian cinema. This is with a view to emphasize the growing influence of the industry on the continent as a pace-setter, and its importance as a warehouse of native cultural dynamics. On the strength of this influence, a critique of Nollywood could open up avenues for a deeper understanding of African cinema. The growing influence of Nigerian cinema notwithstanding, it has remained particularly problematic to equate Nollywood to “African popular cinema.” Saul and Austen caution that African cinema must be thought of as the co-existence of a “long-established tradition of celluloid art films centred in French speaking West Africa … and a newer more commercial video film industry based in English-speaking Africa and labeled, after its major Nigerian source, Nollywood.” Saul and Austen also suggest that both genres of the African cinema flourished in the wake of postcolonial discourse. It is therefore

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evident that the cinematic space was also utilized in the project of decolonization. The earliest Nigerian productions engaged in writing back to the empire to stage the rich cultural heritage of the African world. Prominent in this prism would be the filmic adaptation of Achebe’s all time classic, Things Fall Apart (1958), released in 1986. Since the early years of decolonization, Nollywood has, however, witnessed significant progress in production, content, and thematic foci. Scholars posit that “from the year 2000, the thematic concerns of Nigerian films shifted significantly from voodoo, illegal wealth and women’s plight to an upsurge in romantic comedy, and to political issues, such as governance, war and oil exploration” (Agina, 2018, p. 2). The temporalities and societal progress emblematic in this brief historical account of Nollywood are evident in Black November (2012). The movie chronicles the lived experiences of communities in the Niger Delta, and similarly serve as a mirror through which the communities juxtapose their daily lives to the activities of oil corporations and the exploitation of their lands. The operation of Western Oil in the region relives the colonial occupation of the African Continent by western powers, and the initiation of the exploitative matrix. Series of cuts are deployed in Black November (2012) to bring these multiple temporalities into a whole, sequencing the birth of Ebiere (the protagonist and heroine of the film) and the award of a scholarship to her by Western Oil for university education in the United States (00:11:54 – 00:13:30). Through this cinematic technique, the movie travels through time to mobilize and put onstage the travails and social evolution of the community. It further mobilizes the cinematic element of foreshadowing, in an early prefiguration of Ebiere’s imminent execution, to emphasize the suffering and silencing of communities in their quest for a clean, safe, and habitable environment. A closer examination of the second half of the title of the film, Struggle for the Niger Delta, sheds light on the immediate temporality of the region in the face of the ecological war imposed on the region by excessive extraction and capitalist greed. This struggle for the Niger Delta could be further sub-divided into two basic frameworks, namely: the acquiescence of the environmentally impoverished and the violent opposition of the freedom fighters. This is presented in the opening scenes of the film, where the insurrectionary team of the Delta takes the Managing Director of Western Oil hostage in Los Angeles. Similar activities dominated the Niger Delta’s encounter with Euro-American presence in the first decade of the twenty-first century leading to the politics of amnesty in the region by the political establishment in 2009. Virdi (2003) argues that akin to the evolution of Nollywood, the cinematic space of India works as a technology of cultural memory through the historicization of a heterogenous Indian. This conceptual framing of Bollywood is reinforced in Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, as the film mobilizes the genre of historical drama to traverse the temporalities of the past,

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present, and future. The film relives the struggles of Bhopal, and its eventual reduction to what Beck and Ritter has theorized as “risk society” in the journey to the receding promises of a “new modernity” (1992). The film also reestablishes itself in the present, in the survival of the victims of Bhopal and the lingering birth defects in infants because of the continuing pollution of the atmosphere. It, lastly, registers itself in the cultural memory of the region, particularly with regard to future dealings of local Indian communities with newer multinational corporations. Beyond the dominant focus of the film on the catastrophe, through the struggles of Dilip, one of the workers at Union Carbide, the film provides insights into cultural struggles and socially imposed pressures on masculinity. Dilip struggles to save money while endangering his body at Union Carbide, to enable him meet social expectations such as marrying off his sister and sustaining his family. Dilip’s rickshaw, which collapses under the heavy weight of Union Carbide personnel (cf. A Prayer for Rain), also points to Union Carbide’s environmental, economic, and political pressure on the local community. Black November and Bhopal: Prayer for Rain show continuities in unmasking the modern approaches to human and environmental destruction in the Anthropocene. While Ebiere’s execution alerts us to the necropolitical turn in environmental struggles, Bhopal visualizes the biopolitical, both corroborated by state actors. In the Delta, we bear witness through cinema to the resilience and indomitable nature of the human spirit to piece together a life and subjectivity in a damaged ecosystem. In Bhopal, the audience is catapulted into a prototype of an uninhabitable world. Both events and spaces speak to the spectacle of death, as well as the velocity of it. The distinct but entangled working of these films/spaces/and environmental encounters has triggered a co-critique of both films. In what follows, I engage the environmental turns in these films. Black November: The Environmental Turn

At the end of the repeated series of the instructive foreshadowings that introduce Black November, the film makes a return to the chronological progression of events with the scene of a tense community: everyone with kegs in hand. Ebiere’s mother announces to her neighbor “They say the pipelines are leaking again” (00:13:25 – 00:14:45). In response to this catastrophe considered profitable by the locals, the community rushes en masse to the scene of the pollution to scoop up petroleum for household use. At the same time, Ebiere returns to the village from the United States of America, where she had been for her university education, through a bogus scholarship scheme by Western Oil aimed at public relations. Ebiere is informed of the pipeline leak, which has brought the entire village out on the roads. With a look of disgust and fear, she heads off to the scene to see her mother. Ebiere’s mother

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has mobilized the villagers to scoop as much of the product as possible, partly for home use and to further prevent the product from damaging the environment. The scooping crowd is confronted by a team of police officers, who announce, “You are all under arrest!” Ebiere’s mother interjects, “What is our crime?” The police assert, “Stealing! … This fuel is the property of the Federal Government of Nigeria” (00:14:55 – 00:15:50). The ensuing confrontation unveils the power dynamics between the political establishment and the local community, as well as the defiant nature of the locals to the state. Sequel to the altercation, the police officer lights a cigarette to set the oil scooping community ablaze. Ebiere is only about 500 meters from the scene and witnesses the triple disaster of the oil spill, the poverty-ridden community, and the eventual burning to death of her kith and kin. Figure 9.4 and the succeeding frames set the stage for the environmental focus of Black November, and also evokes the intersection of climatic and ecological concerns. Through a wide shot, the devastated landscape of the Niger Delta setting is laid bare to unmask a locale extracted to exhaustion, as the terrain is bereft of any vegetation whatsoever. The densely foggy atmosphere bears testimony to the pollution of the ambient air in the region, as numerous gas flaring facilities slowly burn the communities and the surrounding environment to ashes. A rampaging community, many of whom are children and scantily clothed, runs to the spot of the pipeline leakage, also bringing the material and environmental nudity of the region onto global stage. Figure 9.4, among others, foregrounds the glaring contrast between the life of the people of the Delta and the economic worth of the petroleum product underneath their feet. While the latter has great financial clout on the global stage, the oppression of the former is rendered invisible on the global stage. From an ecocritical prism, the wide-angle shot situates the locals together with the natural environment on the one hand, and on the other,

FIGURE 9.4 Scene

of a leaking pipeline (Black November: 00:14:31).

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projects them in their reduced form as the wide shot minimizes their physical structure. The locals in Figure 9.4 seem quite non-human, they are seen through the foggy atmosphere, metaphorically being cooked by the blazing gas flares. Also worthy of note is the insidious concealment of the pipelines underpinning the clandestine operations of multinational conglomerates. Bear in the mind that the entire film is set between Nigeria and America; this unsettling scene of disaster is domesticated in the Niger Delta to underpin the continued internalization of ruins, casualties, and disaster in the region. On the other hand, it also unmasks the externalization of profit across the divide of the equator. Within the prism of Nixon’s theoretical conceptualization of “slow violence” as an unspectacular form of violence, the Niger Delta becomes the exemplar of a terrestrial space, perpetually under the threat of destruction by violent economic structures that temporarily conceal the velocity of their destructive force (Nixon, 2011, p. 8). Here, we think of the underground pipeline, the covert explosive potential of the pipeline, the devastated environment, and the economic precarity of the people. In their comprehensive study on the health implications of pollution for humans in the Niger Delta, Ordinioha and Brisibe show the normalization of disaster in the Niger Delta. They note that the region sits on an estimated landmass of about 70,000 square kilometers though a substantial portion of this is permanently underwater for most parts of the year. Seven thousand kilometers of buried, semi-buried, and full-surface corrugated oil pipelines crisscross the available landmass. An estimated 240,000 barrels of crude oil spill every year on the region, and 13 million barrels of crude oil spill have been recorded in the last fifty years. Official documents attest that the region hosts about 7,000 crude oil spill sites without proper remediation, and ninety-six gas-flaring sites (2013, pp. 11–12). In short, it does not require deep imagination to gauge the explosive presence of the fossil fuel industry in the region. In the modern discourse on the Niger Delta, scenes of destruction similar to the succeeding frames of Figure 9.4 are considered within the matrix of the failures of the postcolonial state. Consequently, the Niger Delta environmental catastrophe is often interrogated through a postcolonial lens and never seriously engaged as constituting severe ecological concerns. Nixon, however, emphasizes that postcolonialism has tended to foreground hybridity and cross-culturation. Ecocritics, on the other hand, have historically been drawn more to the discourses of purity: virgin wilderness and the preservation of uncorrupted last great places. Further, postcolonial writing and criticism largely concern themselves with displacement, while environmental literary studies tend to give priority to the literature of place (2005, p. 235). Here, Nixon provides a timely intervention into the prevalent “eco-racism,” to borrow the thought of Melosi, against the imagined space of the so-called global south (1995). To be clear, eco-racism is unperturbed by the commodification and exhaustion of places and people in the imagined global south,

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and more obsessed with wilderness narratives and the preservation of virgin places in the so-called global north. Nixon’s argument encourages us to reject the temptation to sideline environmental ethics in favor of the postcolonial discourses. Without downplaying the catastrophe of human casualties, I would like to focus on the violation of the environment. I argue that the protection of the environment is indeed the preservation of nature, and its constituent entities, including the human body, as both remain inseparable. On the inseparability of the environment and humans, particularly, in the Niger Delta, Saro-Wiwa affirms I have used the term Ogoni [Niger Delta] in preference to ‘Ogoniland’ [Niger Delta environment …]; this is because to the Ogoni [Niger Delta], the land and the people are one and are expressed as such in our local languages. It emphasizes to my mind, the close relationship between the Ogoni people and their environment. (1995, p. 2) The argument pursued here is in tandem with the submission of Saro-Wiwa on the entanglement of people with their immediate environments as introduced in Figure 9.4. This wide shot staging the people in nature, as well as the ruins of the Delta, counters the very idea of deep ecology, which according to Heise, “foregrounds the value of nature and of itself, the right of other species, and the importance of small communities” (2006, p. 507). Seen through Heise’s deep ecological thought, the Niger Delta environment is presented as an object – a violated space – bereft of any shared subjectivity. The 7,000 kilometers of pipelines running through waterways, forests, and farmlands remind us of the violent removal of natural vegetation in the region. The pipelines initiate the disturbance of aquatic bodies and the natural flow of sea species, and their presence within habitable spaces also denies sacred places their right to existence. The sacredness and symbiotic relationships within the Niger Delta’s natural landscape are disregarded by capitalist interests. The pipeline leakage stages a spectacle, summoning the community to witness nature’s ruin and destruction. Furthermore, a subtle relation is equally established in the scene under review between the police – as the proxy of the political hegemony – and multinational oil corporations visible in the ubiquitous pipelines. The political hegemony establishes an alliance with the agents of global capitalism (pipeline owners) against the people. In the summary arrest of the community by the police, a high angle shot is employed to visualize the people and their environment, thereby underlining the equation of power relations. Mamer (2003) observes that, high-angle shots “tend to diminish a subject, making it look intimidated or threatened. This is the conventional way of making characters look insignificant” (p. 23). Through this technique, the

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asymmetrical power relation between the people and the political establishment is made clear because the high angle shot is use to further shrink the human subject. In the premeditated extermination of the community scooping up the spilled petroleum product by the police officer, the viewer is exposed to the operation of the necropolitical powers of regime, licensed to enact violence at will. The incineration of the community reminds us of “Jesse … the community where petrol pipeline fires killed about 1,000 villagers in 1998” (Bassey, 2012, p. 3). While the Jesse incident could be blamed on the negligence of relevant agencies to efficiently respond to a pipeline leakage, Black November indicts law enforcement arm of the political establishment for the destruction of the community. Given the ever-abiding presence of death in the community’s responsive or lethargic action to environmental damage, it is possible to imagine the instrumentalization of violence to silence other vulnerable communities. The delineated scenes discussed above underscore the resilience of the South as a cultural response to oppression from the colonial project into the Anthropocene, and equally turn the camera focus on phases of resistance. In the aftermath of the disaster, Western Oil visits the community to present a proposal for compensation of either family or community in an effort to retrieve its corporate image from the stain of pollution and destruction. The proposal emphasizes for the umpteenth time the neglect of environmental damage, as attention is focused instead on compensation for the loss of human life. It also highlights the neoliberal formula of the commodification of human life. In this matrix, nature, the biosphere, and the environment are abandoned, while human lives are reduced to commodities, derogatorily priced and valued in an effort to erase memories of the disaster. For clarity, I do not intend to dismiss the need for compassion for tragedies suffered. Rather, I suggest that similar sentiments must be directed toward remediating the environment, and ultimately returning nature to the path of self-recovery and healing. Western Oil’s proposal is tossed at the community, and an argument ensues over who gets what – a classic example of the colonial formula of ‘divide and rule.’ At the meeting, Ebiere, a symbolic and representative voice of activism in the Niger Delta struggle, asserts, “What they do is give us sickness, and then treat us. They make us hungry, and then feed us, they kill our loved ones and then offer us money for burial. If you do not change your ways, the people will rise” (Black November, 00:22:00). In this series of juxtapositions, disaster is twinned with a theory of dependency for the smooth operation of an extractive relation to the environment; the much taunted ‘progress’ of the modern world is revealed as an elusive promise. The ensuing confusion within the community arising from the proposal of Western Oil is deployed by the multinational corporation to shortchange both the community and the

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environment. In the end, neither the community nor individual families are compensated, as four community chiefs are settled in lieu of the entire community and the environment. The turn of event unfolds the reverse side of the Niger Delta’s approach to resistance. Resistance as a Trope of Southern-ness

Figure 9.5 captures the scene of the bombed oil installation of Western Oil, leading to the climax of resistance by the communities in the fight against pollution. The music track “We Rise Up” by Mavado featuring Akon and Rick Ross accompanies the rampage of the Niger Delta freedom fighters through the facilities of Western Oil. The insurrection of the group, perhaps condemnable in some quarters, finds validation in the Fanonian thinking of resistance and decolonization as equally violent phenomena (cf. Fanon 1963). If Figure 9.5 could be compared to the scene establishing the destruction of the community in the gas explosion set in motion by the police, how then do we conceive the bombing of the oil installation as a resistance to ecological destruction? If anything, this form of resistance exacerbates the environmental woes of the community initiated by Western Oil. While humans may seem absent from the immediate frames of explosion, the carbon dioxide and carcinogenic substances emitted into the atmosphere worsen the health hazard of chronic bronchitis in the region. Local communities are thus implicated in the ongoing destruction of their environment in the very process of their resisting the establishment. This matrix further plays into the ongoing rhetoric of a green economy, and the so-called sustainable development, in an effort to salvage the threat of cascading planetary crisis. To be clear, some of these operations come off

FIGURE 9.5 Resistant

Niger Delta Group Bomb Oil Installation of Western Oil (Black November: 00:55:39).

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as the sheer exploitation of nature under a new guise, or simply put, green-washing capitalism. Phillips (2019) satirically chronicles some of the poor decisions made by humans since the beginning of time in their quest to ‘assist nature’. Chief among these historical failures is the story of Eugene Schieffelin, who as the chairman of the American Acclimatization Association, and an inveterate enthusiast of Shakespeare, had introduced every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays to America. By 1890, sixty European starlings were introduced in America, and an additional forty by 1891. The introduced birds would return to haunt American society by driving native species into near extinction, spreading diseases, and destroying crops. The notoriety of the starlings was revealed in 1960 in Boston, when “an estimated 10,000 starling flew into a plane as it took off from Logan Airport, destroying its engines and sending it crashing to the ground, where 62 of the 72 passengers on board died” (pp. 78–81) Similarly, we could re-imagine Rachel Carson’s argument in Silent Spring (1962) on the politically and economically justifiable use of pesticides to enhance agricultural produce, fight hunger in some developing countries, and malaria at other places. It took only a few more years to unmask pesticides as biocides in America, leading to the relocation of the toxic industries to Bhopal, orchestrated by Union Carbide ostensibly to aid agricultural production in India and support the starving community, create jobs, and ‘improve standards of living’. The Bhopal disaster on December 2 and 3, 1984, created a theater of death. In clear terms, the industrial disaster destroyed more human lives among other ecological beings in one night than starvation would have done in one year. I have referred to these instances to strengthen the antithesis of modernity and industrialization. In place of the brutal force at play at the Niger Delta, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain offers an alternative but instructive narrative of resistance and resilience. A Resilient South: Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain

Comparative to the foreshadowing of disaster in Black November (2012), Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain (2014) stands the Bhopal narrative of disaster on its head, returning to the beginning of things. The aerial shot of Figure 9.6 stretches viewers’ imagination of Bhopal in the middle of its crisis; the poisonous emission brightly coloured in red foretelling the danger ahead, as the diminishing figures of the human bodies below attest to the imminent extermination. At the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), methyl isocyanate leaks through the defective storage facility into the atmosphere, poisoning the slums of Bhopal and neighboring communities. The accident partly emanates from the greed of the firm to double production in order to cushion the effect of low sales in the preceding months, necessitating the use of an already damaged storage facility, with zero-caution regarding quality and safety

222  A. Chukwudumebi Obute

FIGURE 9.6 MIC

Leakage, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, 00:01:07.

control. Meanwhile, the public alarm system to alert workers and the community in the case of any danger is not functional. Union Carbide, in seeking to keep under wraps its shortcomings in the sphere of safety, made public escape from the environmental disaster near impossible. In the end, all that was solid (of MIC) melted into thin air to render the Bhopal community a theater of death. Through the aerial shots, methyl isocyanate assumes the very nature of a destructive element, larger that the human subject below it. The leaked gas gradually permeates the atmosphere to amplify the vulnerability of the human body. As against the explosive nature of death encountered the Niger Delta, residents of Bhopal simply perish through an ecological catastrophe that suffuses daily life. It is imperative to acknowledge the remediation effort of the UCIL workers below, who engage a damage control mechanism against MIC with water – a natural and unadulterated compound. In fact, the water therapy invokes the second phase of the title of the movie, A Prayer for Rain, as the only antidote to the looming MIC disaster. The failure of the water therapy figuratively casts doubt on the ability of ‘green economy’ or ‘clean capitalism’ to remedy the present ecological crisis of the world. If anything, nature could heal and renew itself, without the profit-driven argument of green economy and clean capitalism. Be that as it may, my focus at this juncture is not much of a critique of the disaster itself but the mode of resilience and resistance presented by the community, as a possible alternative to the violent tone of the Niger Delta resistance movement. Perhaps reminiscent of Gandhi’s non-violent and diplomatic approach to the anticolonial project, an unnamed journalist befriends a Union Carbide paramedic to request a clandestine autopsy on Rakesh (see Figure 9.7) – a local who had earlier died from MIC poisoning at Union Carbide. The close-up shot of the journalist is indicative of his bravery in seeking to bring the corporation to accountability for Rakesh’s death, regardless of the visible

Cinematics of Southern Environmentalism  223

journalist investigating Union Carbide (Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain: 00:20:03).

FIGURE 9.7 Unnamed

powerful influence of the corporation. On a visit to the hospital, he asks the doctor, “Who is on the menu today?” The body of Rakesh is revealed on a stretcher (Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, 00:14:15). Through his carefully chosen words, viewers figuratively make sense of Union Carbide as a cannibalistic corporation, feeding off the life of the community. The idea of menu invokes the act of eating, consumerism, and its repetitive nature. In journalism and the press, Bhopal finds a voice against the monster of capitalism and its ruination of geographies, further underpinning how the resistance movement is folded into cinema and journalism (Figure 9.8). As the anonymous journalist notes, my headlines are “big, relevant, and rude” (00:32:45). On the newsprint, viewers and readers find “Carbide” in big and bold print, as its relevance is attested to in local and international politics. The rude behaviour of the corporation engraves itself into its dealings with the local workers, as well as the safety and well-being of the entire Bhopal community. Using the soft-power of journalism and print media, Bhopal offers resistance and speaks truth to power on the devastation of the community. The effectiveness of this approach to a belligerent network of international corporate interests would demand a different debate of its own. I have, in this chapter, I have mobilized Menon’s idea of “Afro-Asian affinities” to examine an Indo-Nigerian cinematic intervention in current environmental crisis. While the Niger Delta narrative provides us a cinematic understanding of ecological crisis in its conventional and immediate form, where biodiversity destruction assumes explosive dimensions, Bhopal stages the other side of the coin of “slow violence” to environmental and human destruction. Both spaces equally offer us ideas on resilience and resistance in

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FIGURE 9.8 The

Voice of Bhopal (Bhopal A Prayer for Rain: 00:32:28).

our ever-changing world of depleting ecological agents. By way of conclusion, I submit that the Indo-Nigerian cinematic space is an affective space of human connectedness to the natural environment. The experiences of the Niger Delta and Bhopal, through these films, are viable ways of forging deeper connections to environmentally endangered communities. The audiovisual materials invite readers to rethink cultural practices, and our ‘insignificant’ engagements with emerging green capitalism as an antidote to the current environmental challenges. Bibliography Agina, A., 2018. Black November (2012) and its Social Change Potential: Reactions from the Audience. Critical African Studies, 10(2), pp. 1–14. Anderson, B., 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Badejo, A.B., 1989. Nigeria and India Relations, 1960–1985: A study in South-­South cooperation. In: A.B. Akinyemi et al., eds. Nigeria since Independence: The First 25 Years: International Relations. Vol. X. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., pp. 1–31. Bassey, N., 2012. To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and Climate Crisis in Africa. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press. Beck, U. & Ritter, M., 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, 2014. [Film] Directed by Ravi Kumar. Indian: Ravi Walia. Black November: Struggle for the Niger Delta, 2012. [Film] Directed by Jeta Amata. Nigeria: Wells & Jeta Entertainment. Buell, L., 2001. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Carson, R., 1962. Silent Spring. London: Penguin Books. Chile, N., 2021. Nollywood Meets Bollywood in Love Tale ‘Namaste Wahala’. [Online] Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nigeria-film-bollywoodidUSKBN2AC17T[Accessed 31 March 2021]. Elsaesser, T. & Buckland, W., 2002. Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press. Fanon, F., Sartre, J.-P. & Farrington, C., 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne, n.d.. Concepts of the Global South – Voices from around the world. University of Cologne. https://kups.ub.unikoeln.de/6399/1/voices012015_concepts_of_the_global_south.pdf Heise, U., 2006. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism. PMLA, 121(2), pp. 503–517. Krings, M. & Okome, O., 2013. Nollywood and Its Diaspora: An Introduction. In: M. Krings & O. Okome, eds. Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Industry. Indiana: Indiana University Press, pp. 1–22. Krstić, I., 2016. Slums on the Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Kura, S. B., 2009. Nigeria-India Economic, Political and Socio-Cultural Relations: Critical Reflection for Continuos Mutual Co-operation. IJAPS, 5(1), pp. 1–31. Mamer, B., 2003. Film Production Technique: Creating the Accomplished Image. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning. Melosi, M. V., 1995. Equity, Eco-Racism and Environmental History. Environmental History Review, 19(3), pp. 1–16. Menon, D., 2018. Thinking about the Global South: Affinity and Knowledge. In: R. West-Pavlov, ed. The Global South and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 34–44. Namaste Wahala, 2020. [Film] Directed by Hamisha Daryani Ahuja. Nigeria: Forever 7 Entertainment. Nixon, R., 2005. Environmentalism and Postcolonialism. In: A. Loomba, S. Kaul, M. Bunzi, A. Burton, & J. Esty, ed. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham: Duke University Press,, pp. 233–251. ———, 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Onuzulike, U., 2008. The Birth of Nollywood: The Nigerian Movie Industry. Black Camera, 22(1) pp. 25–26. Opeyemi, F. K., 2008. Nollywood Portrayal of the Nigerian Society: Issues in Question. International Journal of Communications, 1(9) pp. 282–290. Ordinioha, B. & Brisibe, S., 2013. The Human Health Implication of Crude Oil Spills in the Niger Delta, Nigeria: An Interpretation of Published Studies. Journal of Nigerian Medical Association, pp. 10–16. Phillips, T., 2019. Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up. London: Headline Group. Saro-Wiwa, K., 1995. A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. London: Penguin Books. Virdi, J., 2003. The Cinematic Imagi Nation: Indian Popular Films as Social History. London: Rutger University Press.

INDEX

Pages in italics refer to figures and pages followed by n refer to notes. Aadhar 88 Abdelsalam, Shady 24, 25, 42 A Brief History of Neoliberalism 5 Abu Ali, Mustafa 61 Abu, Ashiq 160 Abu Seif, Salah 24 Actor-­Network-­Theory (ANT) 159 Adoti, Razaaq 207 Advani, L.K. 74 aesthetics: of realism and radical rationality 111; sound, space and scale 166–167; of unruliness 17 Afolayan, Kunle 109 Afro-­Asian affinities 18, 206, 223 Agarrando pueblo 182 Akon 207, 220 Al Azima 23 Al Capone 138 Al-­Zubaidi, Kais 61 Amarna Cache 26 Amata, Jeta 206 Amazon Prime Video 109 ancient Egyptian: civilization 29; history and culture 24 Anderson, Warren 209 Andhe Ghore Da Daan/Alms for a Blind Horse 116 Andromeda Strain 157 antagonism 140 Anti-­Siege 66

Apu trilogy 11 Arnold, Matthew 2 Association of Malayalee Movie Artists (AMMA) 164 Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) 122 authenticity/inauthenticity 142 Awlad Al Zawat 7 Azoulay, A. 48, 54 Badejo 211 Bale Convention of 1990 212 Barakat, Henri 24 Barsoum Looking for a Job 7 Barton, Mischa 208 Basinger, Kim 207 The Battle of Algiers 122 Bayoumi, Mohammed 6 Beck, U. 215 Benjamin, W. 50, 101 Bennett, J. 194 Bhagwat, Mohan 76, 83, 85 Bharadwaj, Vishal 12 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 72, 108 Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain (2014) 204, 206, 208, 211–212, 214, 221; aerial wide shot of Bhopal 209 Bhopal disaster of December 2 and 3, 1984 208–209 biocides 211

Index  227

biopolitical state 175 Black God, White Devil 118 Black November: Struggle for the Niger Delta (2012) 204, 206, 208, 211–212, 215, 219; scene of leaking pipeline 216 Black slaves 164 Bollywood 214; films 107; mythologies 111 Book of the Dead 27 bourgeois individualism 3 The Boy in the Branch 73, 75–86 Brasoum Is Looking for a Job 7 Bresson, Robert 9 Brisibe, S. 217 British colonial-­era 124 British Commonwealth 211 Brugsch, Emil 24 Brunow, Dagmar 46 Buckland, W. 210 Buell, L. 208 Butler, J. 58 Bystrom, K. 200 Camino a Nóvita en la montaña de Tamaná 189 Carim, Mohamed F. 135 Carson, R. 211 Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) 72 The CEO 109 Chahine, Youssef 24 Chai Darbari 73, 75, 86–94 Char Adhyaya 9 Chatterjee, Tannishtha 209 cinema, Indian aesthetics of 9–13 cinematic aesthetics 1 cinematic cyberpublic 164 Cinematograph Act of 1952 72 Cinematograph Bill of 2019 72 Citation 109 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA 2019) 102 Cleopatra 24 Clowes, Lindsay 145 Colombian cinema: aesthetic of precariousness 191–193; contemporary urban cinema 181– 182; cultural media 184; discourse of violence in 180–181; engineering new object connections 197–198; Grotesque Experience 196–197; kaleidoscopic configurations 183; neoliberal capitalism 184; precarious

urban subjectivity 188–189; rhythms of endurance 185–186; social ensembles 198–200 Comisión Corográfica 189 Congress party 77 Contagion 157, 165; narratives of 175–177 contemporary Indian film aesthetic 107 The “Cop-­Proof” Gangster 151 Cordell, Gene 142 COVID-­19 pandemic 19 creative adaptations 165 crime-­fiction 147 Cultural Arts Section building 64, 64 The Day of Counting the Years 14, 23, 29; three temporalities 36; Wanis’s journey 37 debris of Palestinian architecture 54 decolonialization 4, 5–6 decolonisation-­liberation 131 De Landa, Manuel 4 Deleuze, G. 1, 4, 35–36, 39, 192 deterritorialization 5–6, 9 Devasundaram, Ashvin Immanuel 16, 107–128 Dhanraj, Deepa 73 Diop, Djibril 118 disease and global capitalism 174 Do Bigha Zamin 118 Do Din Ka Mela 102 domestic patriarchy 115 Double Indemnity 149 Drum’s: Crimson League 147; gangster in 146–148; gangster tropes 148–149; marketing strategy 145–146 Durban Exposed 146 Ebiere 214–216, 219 Ebolawood 157 eco-­racism 217 Effendi, Ahmad 30 Egyptian realism 7 Egyptologists 24 Eliot, T.S. 2 El Khashab, Walid 37–38 Elsaesser, T. 186, 210 embodied spectatorship 101 epidemiological thriller 157 Eriksen 210 escapism 137 Espinosa, Julio Garcia 124 European monopoly 6

228  Index

Evening Shadows 124, 126 explosion in Beirut 67 Eye of Horus 40 Fahmy, Abdelaziz 30 Fanaa 121 Fanon, F. 205 Father, Son and Holy War 74 female emancipation 114 Fenwick, Mac 137, 145–146 Fenwick’s theory 137 Film Society Movement 164 Final Solution 74 flawed femininities 169–170 Foucault, Michel 161 frail masculinities 169–170 Frankfurt School 152 Freund, Bill 139 fringe cinemas 158 Game of Kashmir 80 gamic camera 162 Gandhi’s non-­violent and diplomatic approach 222 Gangat, Goolam 134–135 gangsterism 145–146 gangster media strategies 149–152 gender equality 115 geographical agglomeration 5 Getino, Octavio 2, 111 Ghatak, Ritwik 112 global capitalism 13, 174, 209, 212, 218 global north 20, 100, 133, 174, 204, 210, 218 global south 2, 4–5, 12, 131; aesthetics from the 13–20; cinema and 204–206; cinematic (de) territorialization of 206–211 global visual aesthetic 1 The Globe Gang 132 The God of Small Things 120 Google 164 GoPro camera 112 Granja do Amaral, Diego 45–70 Great Depression 138 The Great Indian Kitchen 13, 112–116, 125–126 Guattari, Felix 4 Guerra, C. 180–201 Habashneh, Khadijeh 49, 51, 70n1; contribution for the revolution 61; director, archivist and cinemateque

founder 59; displaced Palestinians 60; exile, trauma and resistance 59; Palestinian Cinema Institution 62; shares memory 63; Third Cinema Movement 61; visual archive of Palestinian memories and revolution 59 hacker praxis 18, 162–163 Hadley Chase novel 147 Hamid 121 Hankare, S.N. 95 haptic temporality 195 Harb, Talat 7 Hariharan, Veena 157–177 Harris, A. 200 Harvey, David 5 Heatlie, Damon 130–154 hieroglyphic text 29 Hindu: aesthetic theory 110; culture 82; majoritarian orientation 108; nationalism 17; race 80; religious customs 112; Sabrimala shrine 116; scriptural vocabulary 110; supremacist ideology 99; supremacist politics 72; theological doctrine 111 Hinduism 9, 102, 103n2, 108 Hindutva 72, 74, 77, 84–86, 93, 100, 103n2, 103n6, 109; ideologues 92; masculinity 91; political dispensation 108; politics 97 Hollywood gangster film 138–139 Hollywood narrative cinema 2 Hoover, Edgar 142 horizon of expectation 183 Hudson, Tom 207 idea of Indian-­ness 111 identity-­based mobilisation 74 ideology of Hindutva nationalism 108 ideology of nationalism 117 Imam, Mostafa 30 Indian: aesthetics 110; cinemas 134–135; culture 78; socio-­political issues 107 Indian Indie aesthetics 110–112 Indian Parallel cinema movement 111 Indo-­Nigerian: affinity 212; cinematic space 20, 224; landscape 211–216; spatial alignment 210 Innarittu, Alexander 161–162 International Chalu Union 164 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) 45 Israeli foundational footages 49

Index  229

Israeli Ministry of Defence 58 Italian neorealism 7–8, 35, 37, 42–43 Jayasankar, K.P. 72–104 Jean, Wyclef 207 Jiryis, Sabri 67–68 Joseph, Jenson 162 Kachchh Trilogy 101 Kalla Nottam/The False Eye 112 Kaltmeier 210 Karim, Mohammed 6–7 Kasaravalli, Girish 112 Kashmiri cultural history 123 Kashyap, Anurag 12 Kaul, Mani 112 Kawalerowicz, Jerzy 24 Keigo Higashino 165 Korde, Bhau 94–95 Kotef, H. 54 Krings, M. 213 Krstić, I. 204, 210 Kumar, Ashvin 123 Kumar, Vineet 208–209 Kura, S. B. 211 Kya Hua Iss Shaher Ko 73 Lagos 204–205, 208, 212 La Rodrigo D. No futuro 182 Latour, Bruno 159 La vendedora de rosas 182 left-­wing coalition 115 LGBTQ: activism 124; communities 112; identity 112 liberalism 114, 174 Life of an Outcast 116–120 Little Caesar 139 Lok Sabha 93 Looted and Hidden 14, 45, 47–48 The Lotus People 141 Maimane, Arthur 145 Malayali audiences 163 The Malay Mob 136 Mani, K.M. 163 Mankiewicz, Joseph 14, 24 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence 193 Marco Palacios 181 Masjid, Babri 72 Maspero, Gaston 28 Massumi, Brian 5 Maya Darpan 9 Mayolo, Carlos 182

Mendoza, R. 180–201 Menon, Dilip M 1–20, 131, 206, 215 Michael, Eric 100 MIC Leakage 222 Mignolo, Walter 153 mimetic innervation 101 Mishra, Vijay 110 Mission Kashmir 121 Modi, Narendra 108, 115, 118–119 Monaco, James 2 Monteiro, Anjali 72–104 Mumbai 204–205, 208 Mummy 39 Muzaffarnagar Baki Hai 74 My Cocaine Museum 190 Naficy, H. 200 Naidoo, Mack 141 Nair, Rahul Riji 112 Namaste Wahala (2020) 212 National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) 89 National Register of Citizens (NRC) 102 National Socialism 97 necropolitics 20, 204 neoliberalism 4–5, 184, 205 Netflix 16, 109, 125, 213; aesthetic 109 network aesthetic 162–164 network narrative 161–162 New Generation Malayalam Cinema 160–161 Nicol, Mike 144 Niger Delta 217; biodiversity of 208, 212; communities in 214; devastated landscape of 216; environment 218; environmental catastrophe 217; Hollywood and Nollywood characters 207; natural landscape 218; region of Nigeria 206; shot of 207 Nigerian cinema 213 Nigerian government 207 ‘Nigerian Prison Service, Warri Prison,’ (00:01:08) 206 Nigerian productions 214 Nipah epidemic 158 Nixon, R. 217 Nochimson, Martha 138–140 No Fathers in Kashmir 123 Nollywood 213–214 non-­Egyptian audience 9

230  Index

non-­human networks 173–174 Nwigwe, Enyinna 207 Oath 77 Ogoni 218 Okome, O. 213 Old Man Kajee 150 On the Doctrine of the Similar 46 Onuzulike, U. 213 Opeyemi, F. K. 213 Opina, Luis 182 opsigns and sonsigns 35 Ordinioha, B. 217 Outbreak 157 over-­the-­top media services (OTT) 12 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 45 Palestinian: activism 45; cinema 61; liberation movement 46; photojournalism 57; protester 66; resistance 49, 61 Palestinian Cinema Institution (PCI) 45, 59, 62; logo 62 Palestinian Film Institute (PFI) 49, 60 Palestinian Liberation Organization 62 Pappé, I. 59 Parikka, Jussi 158 Pasaje $50 188 Pasricha, Teenaa Kaul 75 Pather Panchali 118 patient zero 170–172 Patwardhan, Anand 75 Paul, N.R. 95 Pécaut, Daniel 183 Peepli Live 120 Pelissery, Lijo Jose 160 Penn, Kal 208 Phillips, T. 221 Pillai, Rajesh 160 political hegemony 212, 218 politics of nationalism 109 The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South 4 The Postmodern Chronotope 31 post-­modernist idea 88 Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 121 public spheres 87 public violence 181 radicalisation 121 Ram Janmabhoomi movement 72

Ram Ke Naam 74 rasa theory 110–111, 122, 127 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 16, 76–78, 80 Rath Yatra 74 rationalism 111, 127 Ravi, Rajeev 160, 166 Ray, Satyajit 112, 118 realism and representation 167–169 Reason 74 Reshi, Talha Arshad 121 Resnais, Alain 97 reverse identification 139 Rio de Janeiro 204–205, 208, 210 Rissas, Chalil 57 Rissas Studio 57 Ritter, M. 215 river Sarayu 86 Rocha, Glauber 118, 186 Rosero Amaya, Luis F. 180–201 Rossellini, Roberto 14, 24 Rourke, Mickey 207 Roy, Arundhati 120 Roy, Bimal 112, 118 RSS pracharaks 81 RSS street march 78 running water 55 Salt n Pepper 160, 163 Sampson, Anthony 145 Saro-­Wiwa, K. 212, 218 Sasi, K.P. 75 Saul 213 Scarface 139 SC/ST Atrocities Act 89 Sela, Rona 49; act of writing counterposes 51; cloistered in the Zionist archive 56; creating bridges between heterogeneous elements 50; curator and film director 49; destruction of Palestinian culture 54; Israeli colonialism 53; logical interpretation 51; personal communications 50; professor of visual culture 50; quest for lost Palestinian archives 63; Rissas’s photographic works 58; Sunken ship 52; visual and oral narrations 53 settler colonialism 52–53 Sex, Lies and Videotape 165 Shahani, Kumar 9, 112 Sharma, Rakesh 74 Sheen, Martin 208

Index  231

shot-­reverse shot 139 Shrivastava, Pawan K. 118 Silent Spring 221 Singh Sawhney, Nakul 74 slaving wife 114 slow violence 217, 223 slums 206–207; of Bhopal 210; production of 208 Slums on the Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums (2016) 204 Smethurst, Paul 31 Sobchack, V. 194 social media 16, 18, 86, 89–91, 97–99, 101, 115, 120, 163, 173 sociopolitical arena 6 socio-­political discourses 116 Sodoul, George 7 Solanas, Fernando 111 South African film industry 130 South African Indian audiences 131 South African Indian gangsters 133 South African Indian masculinity 141 Southern aesthetics 4, 6; act of historiography 31; ancient Egyptian text 27; cinematic/visual representation 29; The Day of Counting the Years 29; Eye of Horus 29; multiplicity of 100–103; spatial separation 33; wide shot of Maspero 27 spatial separation 32, 33 The Stoplight Society 182–183, 197, 200 The Street with No Name 141–143 Sunset Boulevard 149 Surat plague 158 sustainable development 220 Taha, Amir 23–43 Tarde, Gabriel 159 Taussig, M. T. 101, 189, 190 technophilia 173 temples of desire 110 TERZO 8, 20n1 Thahir, Sameer 160 Things Fall Apart (1958) 214 Third Cinema Movement 61 Towards Third Cinema 2 Traffic 163 The Turin Horse (2011) 3 Twenty-­first Dynasty 23, 28

Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) 221 Union Carbide’s Headquarters in America 210 Union Carbide’s Headquarters in the United States of America 209 Union Carbide’s pesticide hazard in Bhopal, India 206; environmental, economic and political pressure 215 urban violence 19, 181 Valluvanadan lingo 161 Victory to Mother India 77 Virdi, J. 214 The Virus 158–160, 166 visual aesthetics 1; from Egypt 6–9 The Voice of Bhopal 224 Wall Street 138 The Wanderer’s Shadow 182, 183, 186–188, 191, 196, 197, 200 Wanis’s entrapment 33 War and Peace 74 Warshow, Robert 139 Webber, J. 200 West Africa Pilot in 1942 211 Western/Eurocentric paradigm 2 Western Oil 207, 212, 219; bombed oil installation of 220, 220; community initiated by 220 WhatsApp group forms 97 When the Sun Didn’t Rise 75 windowing 18, 162–163 Wolfe, Patrick 52 Women’s Cinema Collective (WCC) 164 women’s entertainment 140 Women’s march 57 working-­class audience 8 worshipful gaze 110 The Wretched of the Earth (1963) 205 xenophobic violence 102 Yadav, Rajpal 209 Yaqub, Nadia 61 Yogi Adityanath 117 YouTube 164 Zionist Aggression 61 Zionist settlement 56