Abstract
With the winds of authoritarianism sweeping across democracies in South Asia as elsewhere, the question of how to articulate the new social and political contexts in which we find ourselves is as urgent as ever. Censorship, surveillance and populism have taken on new, changed and sometimes spectacular forms which older vocab-ularies and modes of interpretation do not always appear to counter or even capture. How to speak of, and to, this moment is a challenge that faces scholars, activists and citizens alike.
The original articles in this issue of BioScope do not appear to be particularly directed to an investigation of the current moment and all four are driven by practices of close reading. Nonetheless, each of these articles can be understood to investigate what the film makes sense in contexts of repression or elision. Together, their authors ask how cinema might express or make concretely present what is otherwise beyond the register of the articulable. They point to the narrative elements, generic forms, structural aspects, star texts, minor technologies or small media that provide different opportunities for recounting realities that are elided in mainstream or official accounts or that appear beyond expression. Read in the context of our present political moment, Fahmida Akhter illustrates powerfully how a film that speaks allegorically about history can be read as a critique of the present. Smita Banerjee starts from the premise that events which cannot be seen accurately at the moment they happen may nonetheless be articulated in the popular culture and art of the moment. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil investigates the ways in which new technological and economic possibilities have facilitated a minor media that presents stories, subjects and aesthetics that are absent from mainstream cinema. Syeda Momina Masood reads a text against its grain to tease out the queer energies within. In this way, each of these authors responds to the challenge of articulating what is marginalised, repressed, elided or censored and under their scrutiny, the film texts open up otherwise neglected or silenced sentiments and perspectives.
Fahmida Akhter’s article ‘Agami (The Time Ahead, 1984), the First “Short Film” of Bangladesh: Towards a New Cinematic Aesthetic of Imaging Time and Nation’ pursues this question by exploring how a film dealing with a historical moment allows a filmmaker to analyse and parse the contemporary moment. She presents a close reading of a seminal text from the Bangladesh art film movement, Morshedul Islam’s Agami (1984), and pays particularly close attention to its use of time and representation of gender. Analysing the structural and diegetic aspects of this key text, Akhter suggests that the historical moment of the Bangladesh Liberation War is used in the film to articulate a critical vision of the present. Made in the middle of the 1980s, when the Ershad dictatorship silenced memories of the war and censorship regulations were tightened, Agami interprets and critiques the socio-political conditions of Bangladesh in the 1980s by weaving together different historical moments and collapsing past, present and future. Akhter investigates what she calls the ‘hybrid mode of realism’ that marks Agami and shows how elements such as melodrama, myth and formalism combine with the dense layering of time to articulate an allegorical account of the past that indicts the present. Its use of the Liberation War as a means to present an oppositional account is salient and we can read Akhter’s essay at a further remove to see how both her text and Agami might be understood to complicate the ways in which representations of the past articulate perspectives on the present.
Structures of exclusion and confinement find their counterparts in the ways in which the experiences of certain groups or individuals remain absent from main-stream forms of representation. Changes in technology or infrastructure have historically allowed otherwise absent voices or narratives to emerge in newly public ways. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil’s article ‘The Islamic Subject of Home Cinema of Kerala’ illustrates how this process has worked in the context of northern Kerala. His article focuses on the ‘home cinema’ of the region, a genre facilitated by the availability of VHS and later VCD and DVD formats. Narrating accounts of Muslim protagonists in rural vernaculars, Karinkurayil argues that the films are distinctly different and, in places, antagonistic to the tropes and narratives of mainstream Keralan cinema. Instead, this local film culture produces a low budget, non-theatrical cinema with Muslim protagonists that narrates the repercussions of Gulf labour migration within local communities. Karinkurayil asks what sort of ‘Islamic subject’ these home movies construct. He finds the films striking a complex balance between Islamic visual ethics, the practices of consumption and globalisation facilitated by the Gulf labour migration as well as a nostalgia for a rural-local expressed in vernacular linguistic modes. Karinkurayil avoids simply setting up the home cinema in clear opposition to the mainstream Malayalam language cinema in Kerala; instead, he shows how imbricated the forms of the home cinema are with its mainstream counterpart.
Smita Banerjee’s article ‘Evolution of Dada Uttam Kumar: Performing Masculinity and the Disillusioned Bhadralok Mahanayak in the 1970s Popular Melodramas’ asks how film texts are able to elucidate aspects of social and political reality that contemporaneous commentators in other fields fail to articulate. She draws directly on Moinak Biswas’ work on thinking through the conjunction of history and film and his suggestion of ‘the possibility of cinema working on the documentation of a time … [that] is possibly not even identifiable in the film at the moment of its arrival, but becomes available when the film is brought into contact with another time, our time’ (2007, p. 2). Banerjee uses such insight to parse a ‘fragment’ of Uttam Kumar’s star text and a body of films from the latter part of his career, the 1960s–1970s. In both contexts, the ‘dada’ persona, the esteemed elder brother, faces rapid social and political changes in which the certainties of the 1950s, and with these the position of the mahanayak Uttam Kumar, are no longer given. The films analysed by Banerjee map the disintegration of the ‘bhadralok’ position as neighbourhoods change and young men challenge and taunt the dada character played by Kumar in these films. Banerjee argues effectively that while these challenges to the established social order were not available to contemporaneous social commentators, from the position of the present we can see how these films, as well as the fading of Uttam Kumar’s position within the film industry in the 1970s, illuminated the social transformations that were underway in the period.
Finally, Masood presents an oppositional reading to a Pakistani cult classic in her ‘Visions of Queer Anarchism: Gender, Desire, and Futurity in Omar Ali Khan’s Zibahkhana’. Taking on Omar Ali Khan’s 2007 self-consciously cult horror film, Masood reads the film text in the light of American analyses of Hollywood slasher films. Positing a different configuration of gender within the context of South Asia, and in particular the contours of the khwaja sira community in Pakistan and the mystical Sufism embodied by the malang, Masood re-reads the film’s protagonist Baby. Instead of seeing her as a cross-dressing man, a male killer hiding in a burqa, as previous interpretations have, Masood shows her to be a queer woman who cannibalises normative bodies and disrupts heteronormative structures. Emphasising a pivotal scene in which Baby’s history is narrated by her mother with the help of a photo album that illuminates Baby’s transition, Masood re-reads Zibakhana a series of ‘Visions of Queer Anarchism’ in which the killer protagonists critique and destroy the forces of cis-gendered and heteronormative, but also urban and bourgeois, Pakistan. Masood suggests not only her reading of the text as illuminating hidden dynamics within the film but also Khan’s direction as a generic means to expose the hidden currents of a conflicted society.
The book review section continues some of the themes animating the articles in this issue. Both focus on the question of the contours and limits of ‘independent’ filmmaking practices. Tupur Chatterjee engages substantially with Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram’s 2016 monograph India’s New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid. In his book, Devasundaram presents both the institutional and economic contexts in which what he calls the Indian indie has emerged; he is also presenting a series of case studies of individual films in the book. Both Devasundaram and Chatterjee challenge in different ways the distinctions between self-ascribed ‘alternatives’ and mainstream aesthetics, and modes of production and distribution. What emerges distinctly is the question whether hegemonic forms, majoritarian politics and neoliberal economic incentives might destabilise mainstream cinematic forms or whether these are in fact consolidated in what appear to be alternatives.
Giulia Battaglia’s Documentary Film in India: An Anthropological History (2018) engages with the challenges of outlining the space of the ‘independent’ documentary film or filmmaking practices in ways resonant with Devasundaram. Battaglia opts for an inclusive approach to the question but further extends it to destabilise her position as researcher and ethnographer within the domain of the documentary practice. Deborah Matzner, also an anthropologist engaged with the Indian documentary film, responds to Battaglia’s approach by highlighting the challenges and gains to be had from this sort of commitment and research practice. This book and its review together challenge us to imagine how our accounts might hide or expose knowledge practices and the modes by which things may come to light.