Space

In a 1972 essay titled ‘Narrative Space’, Stephen Heath offered an initial exploration of space in film. Despite what may be dismissed too easily as its Eurocentric frame that characterised 1970s Screen theory, the essay is important to thinking about cinematic spatiality (Heath, 1986). Norming to dominant narrative modes of classical Hollywood cinema, Heath (1986, p. 385) distinguished the tableau views of ‘early film space’ presented through ‘fixed-camera frontal scenes linked as a story,’ from cinematic elements such as camera movement, positioning, edits and mobile frames that construct the vision of narrative films. These elements of mobility, he argued, introduce potential spatial excesses that are controlled by a unified subject position. The production of this subject position, which is also the film’s central agential consciousness, transforms a film’s shots and sequences into legible narrative space. The cinemas of South Asia, which do not necessarily adhere to this norm, test such a definition.

Indeed, a classificatory system founded on the ‘perspectival codes of figuration inherited from Quattrocento’ (Heath, 1986, p. 385) in early fifteenth century Italy introduced a fundamental problem for cinemas that did not inherit perspectival spatial codes. ¹ Heath’s elaboration of narrative space conveyed an implicit developmental teleology not shared by South Asian cinemas. According to his argument, the fixity of early cinema’s tableau aesthetic was ‘broken up in the interests of the unity of action and place and subject view’, primarily because Heath (1986, p. 394) defined cinema as a progressive extension of ‘the narrative models of the novelistic’. South Asian cinema’s consistent integration of the tableau aesthetic into its filmic space, and the region’s complex colonial inheritance of Western novelistic modes of address (discussed in scholarship tracing multiple genealogies of ‘realism’ and ‘modernism’ in the South Asian context) made this an unconvincing proposition (for two scholars separated in time and approach writing on the question of realism in Indian cinema, see Chakravarty [1993] and Majumdar [2016]). The consignment of frontal and iconic articulations of images to the realm of naïve film-making was overturned in the study of South Asian cinemas as much as it was refuted in writings on early cinema (Gunning, 1994, 2004).

Scholars writing about films from India have long paid minute attention to cinema’s spatial organisation as a visual inscription and negotiation of the region’s history. For example, Madhava Prasad (1998, p. 20) has shown that the ‘aesthetics of frontality and its interface with realist conventions of narration have to be seen in the light of the individual subject’s position within different political orders and the corresponding constraints and protocols of spectatorship’. According to Valentina Vitali (2006, p. 166), a transnationally comparativist analysis of filmic space reveals not ‘a homogeneous enunciated subject but several coexisting relays of preindustrial and industrial temporalities’. Revising genre studies, Ravi Vasudevan (2010) has studied Indian cinema’s melodramas as a postcolonial reimagination of the modern public sphere. Taking a materialist turn, Ranjani Mazumdar (2007, 2011) has discussed Bombay cinema in relation to the city’s spaces, enriching the study of cinema and urban spatiality. Axiomatic theories on film space founded on European and American films have been expanded and overturned by South Asian film scholarship challenging the exemplarity of particular socio-historical contexts and film forms.

But there is more to the task of analysing space in relation to film and media than a refutation of Western normativity, or an addition to the range of available studies. Heath noted that (a) ‘[s]paces are born and die like societies; they live, they have a history’ and (b) films are ‘constantly a construction of a space’ (Francastel quoted in Heath, 1986, p. 389). These two statements have profound implications for our understanding of space in relation to film and history. To quote Henri Lefebvre (1991, p. 46), ‘If space is produced, if there is a productive process, we are dealing with history.’ In other words, it is not sufficient to think of space (whether cinematic, novelistic, or social) as a by-product of history. The production of space is history in action. It is what makes the abstractions of time tangible, visible, corporeal and concrete. Space is the terrain, manifestation and shaper of history. In effect, the varied analyses of filmic spaces (of Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood, or any regional film and media form) amends Heath’s analysis with a paradoxical axiomatic: namely, that space is an ontologically central but a historically contingent element of film and media (Jaikumar, 2019, pp. 29–30).

Films from territories we identify today as South Asia, collectively referring to Afghanistan (on occasion grouped with the Middle East), Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, teach us this lesson. The region emerged as a collective roughly onwards of the eighteenth century, when it was transformed into an extractive source of raw material and labour, a captive market and a social laboratory for British, Portuguese and French states and economies. The region became a geographical grouping when its histories were politically yoked together and communalised, with assignations of boundaries dividing a populace into national parcels following bureaucratic determinations of imperial states collaborating with elite local leadership. In effect, as a geopolitical unit, South Asia is an arbitrary and incoherent space. It cannot be understood as a collective given the variable power of its constituent nations, and entrenched intraregional (caste, religion, class and gender) hierarchies that simultaneously constitute and name transregional communities. Yet this very incoherence is a manifestation of the territory’s history.

Thinking about space as a keyword in the context of South Asia’s film and media demands that we attend to how and why we delimit the region’s history, geography, film and media in particular ways. If classical film theory enabled us to turn the mechanics of filmic space inside-out to expose the inner workings of narrative cinema and to understand how any national cinema’s spatial conventions elaborate its industrial context, then studying space from non-Euro-American perspectives provides an opportunity to expand the discussion to the very constitution of categories that explicitly announce themselves as spatial (such as South Asia, the Global South, urban, rural and suburban locations) or carry spatial implications (such as male, female, diasporic, desi, Dalit, queer and modern). It allows us to ask, for instance, whether the epistemic elaboration of popular Indian cinema’s darsanic gaze as a frontal and ocular relationship between temple deity and devotees unthinkingly replicates historical temple-entry prohibitions against people outside the caste system, presumptively excluded from such a gaze. Spatial thinking in film and media may not have gone far enough. Thinking expansively of profilmic and filmed spaces without losing the precise vocabularies of the spatiality of film and media forms in technological recordings and simulations of our worlds puts all spatial categories under the scrutiny of history and politics, including those of history itself (Jaikumar, 2019).