For a Political Cinema to Come - Moinak Biswas

8/9/2019 For a Political Cinema to Come - Moinak Biswas

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COMMENTARY

Economic & PoliticalWeekly EPW august 16, 2014 vol xlIX no 33 23

For a Political Cinema to Come

Moinak Biswas

It has been a universal tendency

of market forms to assimilate

styles, techniques and themes of

the minority alternative films.

This has led to a diversification of

the modes of film-making in

India, sometimes with very

interesting results, and certainly,

to significant technical and

stylistic achievements. This

article, which draws attention tothe refashioning of the

conventional cinema in the

aftermath of the demise of the

parallel-mainstream division in

India, focuses on two questions.

Does the idea of the popular

cinema itself survive the end of

the great divide? Can it really

assimilate the political charge ofthe oppositional cinema?

Political film-making and alterna-

tive cinema have been closely con-nected in India. The current crisis

of the political film, therefore, should

owe as much to the institutional crisis

of alternative film practices as to the

exhaustion of a mode of radical political

imagination. The near absence of politi-

cal film-making in India (I am speaking

here of the industrial fiction films,

not documentaries) corresponds to the

absence of an alternative film sector in

the industry. The last appears especially

strange in the light of the fact that we

produce 1,000 odd feature films a year

in several languages, with a remarkable

concentration of skills and talent in

the major production centres; and also

in view of the fact that, independent

artistic schools of film-making have

experienced a worldwide resurgence

over the last two decades, with Asia

playing a major part. India has managed

to remain unaffected, while Iran, China,

Korea, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnamhave made major contributions to this

resurgence.

An Overview

To give a quick historical overview:

the alternative cinema went into a

general decline in the late 1980s. By the

first years of the following decade, its

institutional support began to be with-

drawn in a systematic manner. The

National Film Development Corpora-

tion, and then the national television

(Doordarshan) retreated from patronage.

National awards and festival support

also became uncertain. The more curi-

ous thing, however, was the loss of

critical support. A turn came in critical

discourse that started debunking the

modernising state exactly around the

same time as the neo-liberal onslaught

on the latter began.

We still have not owned up to this his-

torical convergence. It was not a conver-gence of interests for sure, but one still

needs to put the overlap in perspective.

The new discourses of cultural theory

(a close kin of academic film studies as

the latter emerged in India in the 1990s)

produced a deep scepticism about the

states role in building cultural modernity,

about national reconstruction models

along the lines of state-sponsored deve-

lopment, about narrative realism, etc all in one breath. This discourse gained

currency around the same time as the

new economic wisdom mounted a se-

vere attack on the protectionist state in

the name of free market.

It did not take much time for the last

vestiges of the Indian New Wave and

the institutionally-sponsored alternative

cinema to disintegrate. The market be-

came the singular field of play for all

kinds of fiction film-making. The eco-

nomic dispensation was enough to effect

this transformation, but what is discon-

certing is the new critical doxa that

attended it, and continues to hold sway

even today. In the context of a definite

triumph of the market forms, it has come

to equate art (cinema) with elitism, and

conversely, shows a general inability to

form aesthetic judgment in relation to

commercial forms of expression.

This is peculiar to Indian film scholar-

ship as it stands now. Questions ofaesthetics and artistic alternatives have

not been rendered so irrelevant in any

other critical tradition. Film studies,

as it developed in India in the 1990s,

found this as a natural environment. Its

achievements are a different matter, but

one needs to revisit the original impuls-

es behind the critical commonplaces

that informed a major part of the output

if one is to speak of the connected crisis

of alternative and political film-making.

The equation between an ideology of the

state, for instance, and cultural produc-

tion receiving support from state-aided

institutions, the view of the state itself as

harbouring a uniform ideological pro-

gramme rather than as a site of contend-

ing demands, and further along the axis,

the equation between forms of narration

(most often the realist alternatives) and

nation-building developmentalist ini-

tiatives of the government have been too

easily accepted, without paying atten-tion to the question of the internal logics

of these categories.

Moinak Biswas ([email protected])

is at the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur

University, Kolkata.


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COMMENTARY

august 16, 2014 vol xl IX no 33 EPW Economic & PoliticalWeekly24

This could be debated on another

occasion. I would like to draw attention

here to the refashioning of the conven-

tional cinema itself in the aftermath of

the demise of parallel-mainstream divi-

sion. It has been a universal tendency of

the market forms to assimilate styles,

techniques and themes of the minorityalternative films in the contemporary

phase of capitalism. This has led to a

diversification of the modes of film-

making in India, sometimes with very

interesting results, and certainly, to sig-

nificant technical and stylistic achieve-

ments. But for our present purpose,

two important questions stand out.

Does the idea of the popular cinema

itself survive the end of the great

divide? And can it really assimilate

the political charge of the oppositional

cinema? I believe the answer is negative

in both cases.

Sometime around the middle of the

1990s, corporatisation of financing, new

exhibition modes like the multiplex

theatre and electronic media, and tran-

snational marketing began to shape a

new urban form of the conventional

Bombay, Tamil or Telugu film that

did not seem to need the presumed

people of the popular culture theoryas its addressee. Big industrial cinema

became the elite cinema in India, parti-

cipating deeply in the formation of

the post-liberalisation citizen. This is

why it is now possible to adopt a

mode retro, both in films and in critical

work, vis--vis the 1970s, and even the

1980s. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2006) has

called this process Bollywoodisation

of Indian cinema.

Political Crisis

But I am not thinking of the typical song

and dance entertainment here. The

political crisis is exemplified in the more

curious development of what I would

like to call a social cinema. The con-

ventional cinema has not only shown

the ability to absorb the generic ele-

ments of the art cinema, it has also de-

veloped an interest in socially responsi-

ble content. I am thinking of both films

that deal with systemic issues withpolitical overtones such asNayak (2001),

Rang De Basanti(2006) orNo One Killed

Jessica (2011), and those with issues

of human urgency exemplified best

by what Madhava Prasad (2013), has

recently called the rare disease film,

e g,Black(2005), Tare Zamin Par(2007),

My Name Is Khan(2010) orBarfi (2012),

where individual disability extends

from congenital illnesses to alternativesexual orientation. Politics is elided in

this cinema, which seems to respond to

the demands of a post-political order. A

cinema of consensus is born. One cannot

imagine a possible disagreement about

the problem or the message. Who does

not agree, including the corrupt, that

India suffers from corruption? Or that

the physically disabled should be treated

in a humane manner?

The new legitimacy of commercial

cinema is exemplified by the fact that,

for the first time in the history of Indian

cinema, it is not attended by a social

divide in reception. The age of censure

is over, the secret pleasures of non-

legitimate entertainment gone; even

cultural divides between generations no

longer matter. Teachers and parents

urge their wards to go watch the Bom-

bay film with edifying message. One has

begun to miss the irresponsible cinema

that could still laugh at edification, thelast good instances of which David

Dhawan sometimes produced with the

actor Govinda.

Diversification of the commercial mo des

has indeed created the space for more

serious engagement with political issues,

recent examples of which would be

Peepli Live(2010), and especially,Matru

ki Bijli ka Mandola(2013). These films

do seem to effectively bear the legacy

of 1970spolitical cinema. But the chal-

lenge before political film-making as

alternative cinema today seems to be

how not to reduce the political contra-

diction into perennial social and moral

issues, and not to use allegory as a solu-

tion a tendency that continues to dog

these occasional, cinematically more

exciting attempts.

I would like to suggest that it is

precisely by turning to social issues, or

rather, by turning the world into issues,

by staging problems in their recogni-sable form and prompting opinions,

that the political, the irresolvable

conflicts sustaining apparent social

unities, is pushed out of reckoning. In

this sense, the new social cinema is

non-political. Issues here have the same

valence as development or bourgeois

democracy, on which no opinionating

agent allows him/herself a disagreement

any longer. On the other hand, thenew valorisation of ethics often works

against political consciousness. Jacques

Ranciere, among others, has shown in

his recent work how this ethical turn

has become synonymous with the cul-

ture of consensus (Ranciere 2009). It

should not be surprising that the social

cinema does not require alternative sys-

tems of production support.

It can be argued that the new mass

entertainment in cinema is premised on

the luxury of ignoring the dispersed,

heterogeneous masses, the people of

the escapist popular cinema, as its

implied addressee. Instead, it draws a

boundary around a familiar society to

which it speaks confidently, if neces-

sary, by using English as a major vehicle

for communication, using idioms of

fashion, food, courtship or humour that

clearly point to a community of citizens

passing through familiar rituals of

contemporary capitalism. This is radi-cally different in nature from the popular

cinema of the period between the 1950s

and early 1990s. There is hardly any

point in using the word popular for the

contemporary industrial mainstream,

or continue to study it within the para-

digms of popular culture.

Reinvention of Political Films

But this does not mean that the reinven-

tion of political film-making, which also

means a reinvention of an alternative

film tradition, would entail a return to

the people it used to imagine for itself.

Gilles Deleuze made an observation in

his second book on cinema, Cinema 2:

The Time Image (1985), that could help

us think through the difficult question of

the community that such reinvention

has the task of forming. Deleuze says

the first big difference between classical

and modern cinema is that in classical

cinema the people are there, even thoughthey are oppressed, tricked, subject, even

though blind or unconscious. For the


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Economic & PoliticalWeekly EPW august 16, 2014 vol xlIX no 33 25

Soviet or American cinema before the

second world war, there is a unanimity

about the emergence or the existence of

a people, the people are already there,

real before actual, ideal without being

abstract. In the post-war formation of

the modern cinema, a transition that the

two cinema books by Deleuze study,true political cinema could be made on

the premise that the people no longer

exist, or not yetthe people are missing.

In the west, this truth is hidden by

mechanisms of power and the systems

of majority, but in the third world, it

was absolutely clear, where oppressed

and exploited nations remained in a state

of perpetual minorities, in a collective

identity crisis. (C)inematographic art,

he goes on to write,

(m)ust take part in this task: not that of

addressing a people, which is presupposed

already there, but contributing to the inven-

tion of a people. The moment the master,

the coloniser, proclaims There have never

been people here, the missing people are a

becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty

towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new con-

ditions of a struggle to which a necessarily

political art must contribute (Deleuze 2005).

These words relate to post-war mod-

ernist cinema and the period of decoloni-

sation in the third world, but they remaindeeply relevant to a possible critique of a

social cinema that works on the basis

of unanimity about a globalised socius,

imagines a circle of spectators now

transnationally identified as Indian

through the new identity-making foste-

red by the media complex. Such unity

should be missing, Deleuze warns us.

One could add that the schemes of sim-

ple reversal should also be missing to a

truly political cinema. Problems, in oth-

er words, should not appear in finished

shapes, already formulated, to be resol-

ved by amelioration. This assumes the

false unity of a society, and is by nature

anti-political. By the same logic, political

cinema cannot adopt similar means of

positing issues and resolving them by re-

versing the usual, predominant position.

This should be extended to the confi-

dent realism that the new commercial

cinema has apparently inherited from the

older art film, rendering it irrelevant. I amreminded of an interview by the German

film-maker and writer Alexander Kluge,

who became close to his old teacher

Theodore Adorno in the 1960s. As it is

well known, Adorno was plainly hostile

to cinema, for which he could not see an

escape from pure commodity existence.

In his late essay, Transparencies on

Film (1966), he wrote that the

mimetic impulsesprior to all content and

meaning, incite viewers and listeners to fall

into step as if in a parade. Through (the)

very act of seemingly photocopying the

world, the world as it exists now is affirmed

and re-affirmed.

But he said something interesting to

Kluge apropos the latters nine-hour film

about the student movement in Frank-

furt, which Kluge reported in an inter-

view in 2003. Adorno said to him they

should film blind, if someone records

without intention then something will

always be tracked down (Leslie 2005).

An extreme position as it might seem

to be, it captures a well-known problem

about the claim of films to serve up

reality as a set of self-evident themes.

Blind filming, Adorno thought, could

introduce the negative into this aesthetics

of affirmation. Film is also what falls

between the images (ibid). One should

remember this in the face of a deep satis-

faction developed by the educated urbanintelligentsia in India about films that

talk about serious social issues. The

latter does not guarantee either artistic

standard or political insight. The arti-

culate classes, deeply satisfied with the

social film today, are responsible for

not only a politically inert cinema, but

aesthetic bluntness perpetuated across

the industry. The uneducated masses

do not seem to influence cinematic taste

any more, it is the urban elite that

patronises the coarse sentimentalism of

a Black or the theatrical patriotism of

Rang De Basanti. Without an introduc-

tion of absence into the picture that seems

to give us transparencies of social life no

creative breakthrough seems possible.

On-screen and

Off-screen Realities

There are indeed cinemas that have

emerged across the world in the last two

decades, deeply committed to places,bodies and specific histories, which

invite the viewer to contribute to the

image and the narrative by inhabiting

what falls between images, what lies

outside their visible content. Abbas

Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry 1997; The

Wind Will Carry Us 1999) and Hou

Hsiao-hsien (The Puppetmaster 1993,

Millennium Mambo 2001) create unfin-

ished films that present sets of virtualrelations between on-screen and off-

screen realities. The viewer has to play

off those potential relations against each

other and contribute to the unfolding of

the film actively, she has to make a film

of her own as it were, rather than receive

finished resolutions from the screen.

Michael Haneke (Code Unknown 2000;

Cache2005;White Ribbon 2009) makes

use of what falls between images in a

more directly political manner. He

has perfected the method of allowing

historical trauma to haunt the screen

rather than appear on it as plotted sub-

ject matter, which is in direct opposition

to the sociality of representation and

direct recognition.

Adopting an entirely different appro-

ach, the Dardenne Brothers of Belgium

have shown the possibility of politically

engaging with homelessness, unemploy-

ment and work in a body of films

(Rossetta 1999; The Child2002;The Son2005). They use informal handheld

mobile filming, eliminate the narrative

frame that could provide an explanatory

framework within the film, and capture

the new conditions of labour in the im-

mediacy of their unfolding. They have

brought their documentary film-making

experience into a narrative experiment

that presents a direct perception of

work, the kind of work that now consti-

tutes what some economists call the glo-

bal precariat, labouring in offices, shops

and homes on daily wages, under the

constant threat of unemployment.

Time-Image Cinemas

There is also an art cinema movement

that has emerged in the same period,

from the ashes of the earlier art-house

cinema as it were. This has earned the

misleading name of slow cinema in

recent critical discussions. It is an ex-

treme form of what Deleuze called acinema of the time-image, a mode

born out of the essential dissociation of


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the integrity of action, character and

movement. Freeing time from its subser-

vience to plot and action, this cinema al-

lows duration to take on a concrete

shape on screen, and as a corollary,

withdraws from the simple causality of

action. The process of contemplation

that takes over is not routed through aconsciousness centred in character or

anchored to an authorial perspective.

Instead, it tends to find an embodiment

in space, in the landscape itself.

This cinema certainly seems to value

aesthetic strategy over content, but in

the best examples of the kind, it works at

dismantling the communicative trans-

parency and the utility of messages even

as it moves into a close contact with lives

and neighbourhoods rendered useless,

falling by the wayside of the new tracks

of commerce. Jia Zhangke in China,

Tsai Ming-liang in Taiwan, Apichatpong

Weerasethakul in Thailand, Nuri Bilge

Ceylan in Turkey, Bela Tarr in Hungary,

Pedro Costa in Portugal, Carlos Reygadas

in Mexico have all adopted this aesthetic

of a time out of step with the clock of

development and commodity produc-

tion. The migrant labourer, the peasant,

the casual worker, the small-time trader

people the world of these films. Thequintessential image is the jobless fig-

ure, migrating to the city, stuck in his

tracks somewhere in the middle, inter-

minably waiting.

The mannered silence and slow move-

ment of this cinema has exasperated

many. Following an outburst in a Sight &

Sound editorial in 2010, a debate ensued

on the slow cinema in the blogosphere,

joined by critics like Steven Shaviro,

Mathew Flanagan and John Tuttle

(James 2010; Tuttle 2010; Shaviro 2010;

Flanagan 2012). What was missing in

that debate, however, is the question

why this style has been adopted by so

many important film-makers in the

recent years, and why it has emerged as

a global phenomenon. These are more

important issues for us than that of

idealisation of a style, which may devel-

op its own problem of atrophy. A global

aesthetic of this sort cannot come into

being through the conspiracy of filmfestivals, as some critics seem to think.

As film-makers look for alternatives

across the world, they encounter multi-

directional flows of styles without a time

lag. Digital copies and torrent down-

loads of films, and instantly travelling

critical commentaries reach the unlikeliest

locations in no time today. Cheap, handy

tools make production easier to under-

take, and most importantly, an inter-national community of viewers free the

film-makers from the dependence on

often hostile local markets. A desire to

see a global alternative emerge is no

longer separated from that of forming

alternatives to ones own national com-

munity of viewers and critics.

Conclusions

The Indian alternative to come may not

necessarily repeat these exact tendencies,

but the quick flow and inter-connectedness

of film styles across the world indeed

make such affiliations possible. The re-

discovery of political and alternative film-

making in India may as well emerge on the

basis of the low cost digital film-making,

a film practice that is everyday and

mobile in nature and moves everywhere.

It may find in the cinema of the Dardenne

Brothers a close ally. The cinema of dura-

tion, on the other hand, also has a history

in Indian cinema. In fact, one of thelegacies the Indian New Wave that was

never assimilated by the new commercial

cinema of social responsibility and

cannot indeed be assimilated by it is

the treatment of time found in a signifi-

cant body of films from the 1970s on.

Starting with Mani KaulsUski Roti(1970)

and Kumar ShahanisMaya Darpan(1972),

this tendency can be traced down to

contemporary film-makers like Amit

Dutta (Aadmi ki Aurat aur Anya Kahani-

yan2009), Gurvinder Singh (Anhe Ghora

da Daan 2011) and Gyan Correa (The

Good Road 2013). Whether in Adoor

GopalakrishnansRat Trap(Elippathayam

1981), the study of a decaying feudalhousehold falling into morbid languor, or

in Mani Kauls films that self-avowedly

turned time rather the image into the

substance of a non-dramatic, contempla-

tive narration, cinematic duration

speaks of the asynchrony upon which

aesthetic and political alternatives now

show a tendency to converge.

References

Deleuze, Gilles (2005): Cinema 2: The Time Image,Chapter 8, (trans) Hugh Tomlinson and RobertGaleta (London; Continuum Books).

Flanagan, Mathew (2012): Slow Cinema: Tempo-rality and Style in Contemporary Art andExperimental Film, thesis submitted to Uni-

versity of Exeter, UK (available: https://ore.ex-eter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10036/4432.

James, Nick (2010): Passive Aggressive, Sight &Sound, April.

Leslie, Esther (2005): Adorno, Benjamin, Brechtand Film in Mike Wayne (ed.), Understanding

Film, Marxist Perspectives(London: Pluto Press).

Prasad, Madhava (2013): Diverting Diseases inMeheli Sen and Anustup Basu (ed.), Figura-tions in Indian Film (New York: Palgrave Mac-Millan).

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish (2006): The Bollywoodisa-tion of Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism ina Global Arena in Preben Kaarsholm (ed.),City Flicks, Indian Cinema and the Urban Expe-rience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Ranciere, Jacques (2009): The Ethical Turn inAesthet ics and Politics in Aesthetics and ItsDiscontents(Cambridge: Polity Press).

Shaviro, Steven (2010): Slow Cinema vs FastFilms, www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=891, May.

Tuttle, Harry (2010): Slow Films Easy Li fe, unspo-kencinema.blogspot.in/2010/05/slow-films-easy-life-sight.html, May.

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For a Political Cinema to Come - Moinak Biswas

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