Parichay Patra

Bio: Parichay Patra is an academic researcher from Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur. The author has contributed to research in topics: Movie theater & Dance. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 3 publications receiving 5 citations. Previous affiliations of Parichay Patra include Monash University.

1968 and global cinema: edited by Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2018, 1st edition, 422 pp., $85.99 (printed paper cased), ISBN 9780814345429; $31.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780814342930; $24.99 (ebook), ISBN 9780814342947

Abstract: The ‘monstrous library’ that May 1968 stands for (Atack 1999, 7) includes cinematic histories that are often dominated by the popular, widely accepted history of such contested category as the Fren...

Bombay Cinema’s Aesthetic Other

Abstract: The term shastriya, while aligned with an art form such as cinema, sounds extremely anomalous. Shastriya connotes the sense of something classical, used primarily within the confines of North Indian/Hindustani classical music. It is not without reason that cinema remains dissociated from epithets like these, especially since cinema’s self-imposed inferiority gets in the way. This inferiority stems primarily from the publicness of cinema, from its status as a public institution. So when Mani Kaul tried to define his cinema with a preference for a term like shastriya, it was a decisive statement against the supposed publicness of the medium. His Uski Roti (1969) was given the Sunday evening slot in television, a slot better known for the popular Bombay films. Kaul, on a lighter note, suggested a different slot for his shastriya cinema: [I]t was as if they had shown a classical programme during Chhaya Geet. The point is not that classical music is superior to film music, it is that you cannot confuse the one with the other. They could have had a programme called Shastriya Cinema or something and shown Uski Roti there—like they have Mallikarjun Mansur on Shastriya Sangeet! (Rizvi & Amladi, 1980, pp. 9–10)

And Now Our Watch Begins

Abstract: And Now Our Watch Begins Aurore Spiers (bio) Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen, eds. Unwatchable. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019. 412 pages. $99.95 cloth. $29.95 paperback. “What do you find unwatchable and why?” is the question Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen asked the fifty-six contributors to their edited collection Unwatchable. Their answers had to be personal, short (up to 1,500 words), and quick (within three months) if they were to respond to and engage with the topic’s urgency.1 The “act of covering one’s eyes,” Unwatchable argues, “has become a representative gesture in our contemporary media culture of proliferating scenes and virally circulating images where potentially traumatic content is never more than a click, scroll, or swipe away” (1–2). In Unwatchable, the scholars, critics, visual artists, curators, and archivists who responded to the invitation above find unwatchable images in a wide range of media texts, which allow them to investigate the historical and theoretical ramifications of the unwatchable across media today. As Marc Francis said in Film Quarterly, Unwatchable is “chillingly relevant” and will help readers from many humanistic disciplines understand common affective responses to unwatchable images.2 Unwatchable will also provide readers with strategies not to look away but instead to watch—or witness—harder, longer, and more effectively. After all, most of the contributors have watched the unwatchable themselves [End Page 113] before setting out to share their intimate encounters with what can’t, shouldn’t, or ought not to be seen. The term “unwatchable,” which the editors define as something “unsuitable for viewing” and “disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible” (3), first appeared in the nineteenth century when it described “territories outside surveyable view” (7). The term then became common in the 1960s in discourses about television news network where images from the Vietnam War shocked the American public. In Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Siegfried Kracauer writes that “the film screen is Athena’s polished shield” against the horrors of reality mirrored in documentary images, which he compares to Medusa’s deadly face.3 As this edited collection shows, more images than those considered by Kracauer in 1960 belong to the unwatchable, including those found in contemporary Hollywood cinema, horror cinema, pornography, photojournalism, advertising, silent film archives, and the avant-garde. The editors explain that “with its extensive range of meanings and resonances in our time, the unwatchable might threaten to become a buzzword or catchall category, losing its critical purchase or heuristic value” (19–20). Indeed, since Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016, the term “unwatchable” has been given new currency that puts it at risk of overuse. But Unwatchable succeeds in creating a “cognitive mapping” of this concept along three main axes—violence and testimony, histories and genres, and spectators and objects—each of which includes thoughtful essays that closely examine specific iterations of the unwatchable (20). Several essays focus on the unwatchable as an aesthetic principle meant to “produce critical awareness and ethical insight” (154) through forms of visual transgression and the elimination of spectatorial pleasure. Asbjørn Grønstad claims that in staging scenes of unwatchable (sexual) violence, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, and filmmakers associated with the “New French Extremity” carry on the modernist project against aesthetic pleasure. In the avant-garde too, Kenneth Berger argues that Guy Debord’s film Howls for Sade (1952) mobilizes the unwatchable against the “society of the spectacle,” thereby urging spectators to look without consuming. Noël Carroll shows how Andy Warhol’s eight-hour-long film Empire (1964) is so “inhospitable to human viewing” that it reveals how “machine ‘vision’ is not human vision” (191). Even if few have ever watched Empire from start to finish, Carroll is able to write about its unwatchability, proving that “appreciation without acquaintance is possible” and that “interpretation can be a form of aesthetic experience” (192). [End Page 114] Other essays discuss images of unwatchable realities that reveal the limitations of human vision, which are then supplemented by the camera or “kino-eye.” Unwatchable is especially interested in the many “spectacles of destruction” that would...

Beyond the Metanarratives of Indian Cinema

Abstract: Beyond the Metanarratives of Indian Cinema Parichay Patra (bio) Priya Jaikumar. Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 398 pages. $109.95 cloth. $29.95 paperback. Why should we be so scared of a cosmic or cosmological ambition in cinema? It has always been part of the potential—and destiny—of film to mix the smallest with the largest, the immediate everyday with the longue durée of grand history, the microscopic with the macroscopic. —Adrian Martin, “ ‘The Tree of Life’: Great Events and Ordinary People” (2011) Priya Jaikumar’s Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space is a spatial film historiography and much more than what it usually means. It asks a number of complex questions in the context of Indian film historiography, Indian cinema studies, and the various modes of film history writing in general. Jaikumar presents several arguments that are located in apparently disjointed temporalities and makes a strong case for the reconsideration of spatiality in cinema [End Page 101] studies. It should be noted that the historicist research dominates Indian cinema studies, as opposed to some other views that intended to locate Indian cinema in mythological time and narratives. However, spatial history remained largely ignored. Jaikumar’s work addresses this lack in its own idiosyncratic ways. The book has a complex structure and varied, deceptively disjointed areas of interest. This highly ambitious project defies categorization; it acknowledges its debt to 1970s screen theory yet dissociates itself from the continuation of such legacy through its novel sites of inquiry. Its interdisciplinarity has far-reaching connotations and consequences for Indian cinema studies. The book successfully challenges disciplinary conventions and epistemic borders within several established practices and points out the dearth of prevalent cinema studies narrative(s) in India. For Jaikumar, this dearth might mean the absence of spatiality: her book presents the dominant narrative’s inability to explore the potential of space in the discussion on Indian cinema and India as a location for cinema. In this context, Jaikumar engages with such significant works as Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and Edward Soja’s political geography to develop her theoretical framework. Jaikumar presents a densely informed case that engages with filmed space, profilmic space, the politics and poetics of location shooting and abstraction, the role of the cinematographic apparatus, and above all the idea of a multiplicity of spatial histories spanning over centuries. The afterlives that she presents are mostly unpredictable, as proclaimed in the book; this only adds to the text’s own unpredictability within the larger fabric of Indian film studies. In several interviews related to her most recent (and, I would say, pathbreaking) book, Jaikumar refers to the infamous U.S. wars in the Middle East as an event that triggered her interest in the politics of specific geographies, the sudden media-induced global visibility of apparently obscure locations and spaces.1 As a researcher who worked extensively on empire cinema and the colonial lives of filmmaking practices in South Asia, Jaikumar has always maintained her distance from the more dominant trends and methodologies in Indian cinema studies. Her previous book, on empire cinema, began with a call to abandon “the rubric of national cinemas.”2 In Where Histories Reside, Jaikumar introduces a spatial film historiography that is sui generis in Indian cinema studies. Here her concentration on fragmented spaces and multiple temporalities moves beyond the dominating framework of the national. The idea of space has not been completely overlooked and ignored in Indian cinematic histories. There is historical research [End Page 102] on the formation of Bombay and its cinema, work treating the city as a cinematic archive, and a 2012 volume of verbal and visual essays that explores “the multiple subjectivities related to cinema and the watermarks it has left on the body of a city.”3 However, Jai-kumar’s work is not restricted to the urban space and the cinematic urbanity: hers is an eclectic collection of spatialities, a sustained theorization of this historiographic model. The novelty of Jaikumar’s approach becomes evident as we look at the dominant historiographies in Indian cinema studies in retrospect. According to Ranjani Mazumdar, the latter has...

Las rupturas del 68 en el cine de América Latina

Abstract: Sobre Mestman, Mariano (Coord.) Las rupturas del 68 en el cine de America Latina, Buenos Aires, Akal: 2016, 480 pp., ISBN: 978-987-4544-6-9.

Promoting patriotism through mediated sports: Political economy of Bollywood sports movies

Abstract: Through the lens of political economy of communication and sports, this article examines the role of Bollywood’s sports movies in promoting patriotism and constructing an Indian national identity. ...

Bollywood’s variation on the firanginess theme: Song-and-dance sequences as heterotopic offbeats

Abstract: Song-and-dance sequences have widely been studied as disruptive elements in the narrative of popular Hindi cinema and as quintessential traits of this industry. While the utopic dimension of such m...

A Trail of Fire for Political Cinema. The Hour of the Furnaces Fifty Years Later , organizado por Javier Campo y Humberto Pérez-Blanco

Abstract: Sobre Javier Campo y Humberto Perez-Blanco (editores). A Trail of Fire for Political Cinema . The Hour of the Furnaces Fifty Years Later . Bristol: Intellect, 2019, 260 pp., ISBN: 9781783209163.