Book review: Lalitha Gopalan,Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India

My task is a formidable one: to interlocute with a pathbreaking work – Lalitha Gopalan’s recently released book Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India. Gopalan’s book is a pioneering one for the area of Indian film studies, the first to formalise, historicise and aestheticise the advent of digital cinema in India in such a comprehensive manner. For India, cinema in the digital age has mostly been theorised as being part of New Media assemblages, for example, in the works of Amit Rai (2012), Anustup Basu (2010) and Sudhir Mahadevan (2015). In these works, a generalised focus on global flows of digitality and images is favoured over the nitty gritty of cinema, both technology and content. Instead, in terms of its epochal sweep, exhaustiveness of the range of cinemas discussed and care given to the intersection of mediaphilic generations and technology, the book shares a companionate space with the work of writers of the onset of digital media and technology in China at the start of this millennium, for example, the work of Zhang Zhen (2007) amongst others (Zhen & Dito, 2015).

The author has taken up a monumental task, and very frequently while reading the book, I found myself wondering what a difficult book it must have been to research, collate and write. One would therefore advise readers of the book to be aware of the multiple entry points running on and off and on again. Much pleasure will be afforded by a slow, open reading affording a mental cartography of the threads running through the text, following them up to savour the insights they are made up of and then allowing the threads to play with one another. There is an Ariadne to this cat’s cradle of a book for those who are willing to give in to the game.

The book refuses to be tied down to genre categories: commercial but offbeat cinema, arthouse cinema, artist’s cinema, experimental cinema – it’s all there. I use the words ‘advent’ and ‘digital’ with some care because readers will find Gopalan reading several film texts from the 1980s and 1990s (and often very difficult to access today) for themes and styles that are crucial to contemporary digital moving image cultures. There is an exploration of noir films made in Bombay through televisual or video media at the cusp of the digital (for example, Raakh [Aditya Bhattacharya, 1989]), forbearers of digital ambitions that later cinema in the digital proper would be defined by, as there is of analogue films that nevertheless respond to the digitisation of everyday life by things such as the mobile phone (for example, in Ram Gopal Varma’s Company [2002]). One is left at the end of it all with a digital cinema having waves of longue durée histories, ones that the author deftly signals towards at the very beginning of her book through Bazin’s formulations about an impure cinema. Here we are talking not theatre and literature in cinema as Bazin postulated, but television, video and, above all, all kinds of technologies of filming beyond the conventional.

So now to come to the strands of the book that helped me follow through with its complex ramifications. I have chosen three key terms, knowing fully well that there would be many more that Gopalan herself has in her arsenal as well as those that readers of the books will discover in their own textual and cinephilic passions.

To begin with, the axis of history that runs very strongly through the first two chapters of the book and is very strongly inflected by a logic of intermediality – an enumeration of the histories of technology running through theatre (with which the book opens), cinema, television, video and finally the digital. The second chapter focuses on the first digital features made in India such as Urf Professor (Pankaj Advani, 2001) and Divya Drishti (Sidharth Srinivasan, 2002). The relays between the digital and the proto-digital are many: light cameras, all kinds of film stock, lenses, documentary impulses, televisual pastiche images of cable times, glitches, database cinema, cinephilia and so on. There is a focus on early media collectives, such as Raqs Media Collective and CAMP, transiting from analogue video to digital, and the intermedial exchange between an experimental film culture and journalistic cinephilia through a consideration of coverage of the new cinema of early globalisation in the Indian edition of Time Out magazine.

The second axis I have followed very closely – one that is related to the axis of history but that I feel needs a place of its own – is that of biography, which is presented through a very strong emphasis on the idea of collaboration. The book itself comes across as a collaboration between the author and her many interviewees and cinephiles. Central to this is the careful tracking of the careers of film personnel graduating from the Film and Television Institutes of India located in Pune and Kolkata. Much of this can be found in the first chapter, but the theme of collaboration amongst film school graduates runs through the book. For example, the craft of the cinematographers who are crucial in choosing what camera to shoot with to get the effects desired by the director. There is also a section on the Media Classic Collective in Mumbai in the 1990s. While the collective used emerging digital platforms such as YouTube and blogs like passionforcinema to reach cinephiles, it also became the stable from which some of the most eminent auteurs of offbeat commercial Bombay cinema of our times would emerge, most notably, Anurag Kashyap and Sriram Raghavan.

The final axis for reading Gopalan’s book is the digital itself, connecting very strongly with the idea of affordance – the very flexible mode of filmmaking that the digital is, its much-vaunted plasticity and its peculiar propensity for particular kinds of image-making. Thus, we find the ability for high-contrast imagery and the digital affordance for many shadings of low-light cinematography being very amenable for noir cinema in Bombay (there is, it seems, something very digital about serial killers), or about the nature of fiscal swindles in the time of globalisation: numbers can move across geographies in particular ways in digital times. Another chapter focuses on directors using the digital as particularly open to long-take filmmaking (emphasised by the propensity of cineastes and cinematographers filming rain). The chapter on Tamil popular cinema has a strong emphasis on cinephilic retro-referencing made easier by the database nature of the digital, especially film music cinephilia that marks a film like Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s Aaranya Kaandam (2010). The chapter on road movies emerges as a formulation about the genre itself being open to digital affordances – time distension for example, which becomes a meditation on cinema and gaming aesthetics as we discover in a fabulous re-imagining of an analogue film Kahini (Malay Bhattacharya, 1997), a road movie involving child abduction, recast as a proto-digital cinema.

Needless to say, the three axes of the book are correlated in the digital: collaborations too are digital affordances as is convergence in the digital of divergent pre-digital technologies.

It’s an odyssey of a book. It is an archive painstakingly collated over years through journeys made across the subcontinent and across continents, actually and virtually – cities, cinema halls, viewing chambers of all shapes and sizes, screens of all kinds, festivals attended and curated, and directorial personal copies of films accessed through passwords. And all of this passes through the precarity of technological obsolescence and amnesia. A plethora of media and film theories are marshalled to give conceptual shape to this database cinema, from Derrida to Petho to Manovich to Jenkins to Deleuze to Bruno to Bazin to Landy and many more.

The penultimate part of the book deals with films with a promise of a cinema of randomness that the digital promises – algorithmic across databases. Gopalan meditates on magic and presence – the two ends of the digital, also the two ends of Tantra – through a consideration of Amitabh Bhattacharya’s films: Kaal Abhirati (1989), Bishor Blues (2006) and Cosmic Sex (2012); the latter two dealing with the spiritual and sexual cosmologies of the Bauls of Bengal, a syncretistic culture spanning Islam and Hinduism. Here, experience magically shapeshifts but, in the midst of it all, becomes devoted to mythic presences of monumental scale – sexual collaborators, aniconic god names and craft. This is visionary cinema in two senses: magical animation and mythic monumentality.

The book finishes with a focus on women filmmaker collectives such as Indian Women Cinematographer’s Collective, consisting of women who graduated out of the Pune Film Institute, and Women in Cinema Collective in Kerala as it began with a focus on a film made by a woman filmmaker – Ghode ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (2018), a film made by Anamika Haksar, a doyen of Indian theatre. Another odyssey – women wading through the homosocial world of cine- and techno-philes – provides a fitting end to the book, in many senses.