Abstract
The project put forth in Spectacles of Blood: A Study of Masculinity and Violence in Postcolonial Films is an ambitious one, as the title of the volume suggests. The collection edited by Swaralipi Nandi and Esha Chatterjee contains contributions from scholars of numerous fields of activity, including gender studies, history, film studies, comparative literature and political sciences. Such diversity of perspectives could be considered as a first accomplishment of the book, which succeeds in establishing a rich and multidisciplinary conversation.
The specificity of the topic, besides, distinguishes this collection from publications of similar interests. Spectacles of Blood lies at the crossroads of three long-standing lines of enquiry: (1) a body of research concerned with the link between masculinity and violence (for instance Hatty, 2000); (2) a reflection on cinematic representation of violence, its role as an alluring spectacle and the specificity of its mise-en-scène (among others, Prince, 2003); and (3) a wide range of academic works that, in the last decades, have addressed film theory and history through the lens of postcolonial studies (for a recent example, see Ponzanesi and Waller, 2011).
As Jigna Desai highlights in the preface to the collection, cinematic violence in postcolonial contexts is often reductively associated with ‘political’ cinema; the contributors intend to expand this notion and interrogate the meaning of violence and its ties with masculinity beyond the ‘specific and often geographically concentrated film tradition’ of Third Cinema (p. 11). Although Nandi and Chatterjee convincingly avoid any kind of generalization, they individuate ‘two broad interrelated tropes of postcolonial conditions’ (p. 9): the conflictual relation between indigenous identities and (post)colonial social structures; and the political violence of the nation-state. It should be clear, then, that the editors’ primary focus is on public violence and its gendered dimension; this aspect also provides a common thread among the otherwise very heterogeneous cases presented in the rest of the book.
The first two analyses highlight the role of cinema in shaping the public memories of conflicts in postcolonial nations. Brian Cogan discusses Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002) whereas Jacob Mundy focuses on five films set in Algeria around the time of the civil war. Both scholars provide a thorough contextualization of the historical scenarios narrated by the films, and describe how they articulate some of the unreconciled aspects of the conflicts. In the Irish film, the different ideals of masculinity help to define the watershed between violent and non-violent struggle against colonialism. The Algerian films, on the other hand, complicate the simplistic opposition between civil society and all-male fundamentalist violence, thus providing a counter-history to the official politics of reconciliation promoted by the state.
Two of the following essays deal with the dynamics of gender within postcolonial spaces, as represented on the screen. Peter Mathews provides a comparative analysis of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (2005). While the former is engaged in a deconstruction of the ‘idea of landscape as a repository of femininity waiting to be tamed and conquered’ (p. 53), the latter overtly deploys cinematic stereotypes about Australian masculinity in a ‘daring act of postcolonial tongue-in-cheek mimicry’ (p. 60). In Chapter 8, Hanh Nguyen and RC Lutz interpret the decaying urban landscape of Saigon and the extreme violence of the male protagonists in Cyclo (Tran Anh Hung, 1995) as a commentary on the legacies of colonialism in Vietnam, and the nation’s contradictory position within global capitalism. Both chapters embed the discussion of the films in a useful network of references to their respective cultures, but a more extended discussion of the cinematic treatment of the natural/urban landscape would have further sustained their arguments.
Other contributions, focusing on the plot more than on the mise-en-scène, trace out narratives of masculine transformation whose symbolic dimensions are rooted in postcolonial culture. In Chapter 6, Wisdom Agorde examines a series of ‘videofilms’ from Ghana that deal with occultism as a means of attaining material wealth: the scholar situates this practice at the crossroads between traditional beliefs and the demands of modernity; he also singles out the recurring connection between occult rituals and violence perpetrated by men. In the following essay, Lee Skallerup Bessette reads Le Goût des Jeunes Filles (Dany Laferrière, 2004) as a coming-of-age story in which two fundamental figures in Haitian culture, the zombie and the gwo nèg (the big man) merge into the protagonist as he transitions from boyhood to manhood. Both essays accomplish one of the purposes of the book, which is to detail how violence ‘is nuanced with differences and ambiguities’ according to its specific cultural framework (p. 6). The analyses deal with Oedipal scenarios and the mobility of the identification of male subjects: from a methodological point of view, then, a contextually inflected use of psychoanalysis could have provided a valid instrument.
Chapter 10 stands out not only because it discusses a British television series (Gangsters, BBC 1975–1978) rather than a film, but also because it extensively considers its reception within the context of a former colonizing nation. Mark Duguid and Eleni Liarou draw a convincing parallel between the formal innovation of the series and the cultural hybridity of the world it represented. The portrayal of multiracial Birmingham in the 1970s in a mainstream series allowed for new types of identification, and at the same time it expanded and revised the formulas of its genre. Unfortunately, the issues of masculinity remain underdiscussed in this otherwise insightful essay.
Among the numerous local scenarios taken into account, India has a prominent role and is at the centre of three of the essays. In Chapter 9, Sayantani Satpathi and Samiparna Samanta consider the violent masculinity that has characterized the Bollywood gangster film: they trace its roots back to the discourse of 19th-century Indian nationalists who ‘tried to resist the colonial stereotype of frailty and emasculation’ (p. 137); such a tendency is interweaved with the legitimization of violence brought forth in the gangster genre. In Chapter 12, Laurent Mellet traces the hybrid components that build up the masculine figures in Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008) and interestingly addresses the critical reception of the film. The distinction he operates between a violent ‘masculine’ aesthetics and a melodramatic one appears quite problematic, especially because the vast literature on melodrama in film studies is not taken into account. Finally, Joya Uraizee analyses Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (1995) by showing how the film combines elements of the Bollywood musical and a didactic intent against violence, thus departing from the usual ‘othering’ of Muslim characters in Hindi films. The essay dwells at a greater extent than others on the mise-en-scène (for instance, examining the dynamics of looks among characters on the screen), but does not elaborate fully on their implications for masculinity.
Although not explicitly stated, it is possible to infer which films are considered ‘postcolonial’: all those in which either the narrative, the aesthetics or the conditions of production and/or reception are significantly shaped by the many legacies of colonialism. This categorization, flexible but not too loose, brings under the same lens objects as diverse as Hollywood blockbusters and independent videofilms, which otherwise would hardly be considered within the same framework. This is another quality of the volume, as it helps to establish unexpected connections among very different films and cinematic forms.
The main limit of the book is that, at times, it overlooks important contributions from the field of film studies, and in particular from the body of academic works dealing with cinema and masculinity. A great accomplishment of these works has been to fuse the interpretation of film style and spectators’ experiences: hence masculinity, as all gender identifications, emerges both as a social and as a psychic construct – a process set in motion by the film, grounded in the spectator’s subjectivity, and shaped by the sociocultural context. When the essays of Spectacles of Blood predominantly focus on the films’ plot, such complexity is occasionally lost. Nevertheless, this collection should not be considered as a definitive statement on the topic of violence and masculinity in postcolonial cinema, but rather as the attempt to prepare the ground for a growing interaction among the disciplines. It is, in this perspective, a valuable work, and a potentially useful one for many scholars.