FILM – THEORY: 2

1. Gaze – Moinak Biswas: Sigmund Freud, Christian Metz, Slavoj

Zizek
2. Signification – Cine-linguistics, and semiotics of cinema –
Saussure and Christian Metz,
3. Ideology – Ideology and Cinema
A. Context and Background – Dialectical Materialism and
Marxism
B. Basic Principles of Marx and Althusser
C. Jean-Louis Commoli
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, by V. N Volosinov.:
background
“Part One Chapter 1: Nature of the Linguistic Sign” Course in General
Linguistics by de
Saussure.
“Death of the Author”, Roland Barthes
“Chapter 3: The Cinema: Language or Language System?”. Film
Language: A semiotics of
Cinema, by Christian Metz,
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage”
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
Popular Culture
(Selections)
Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier,
Chapter 3 (Selections)

Moinak Biswas, “Modernity and the Logic of Remnant in Film

Narration”
Guy De Maupassant, “A Country Excursion”
Henry Krips, “Politics of the Gaze; Foucault, Lacan, Zizek”
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977.
Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach”, The German Ideology. Amherst:
Prometheus Books,
1998.
Althusser, Louis. Ideology, and Ideological State Apparatus. Verso. The
whole Essay.
Comolli, Jean-Louis. Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective,
Depth of Field. One
chapter.

Indian Cinema: Alternative Practices

1. MG – Mani Kaul
2. Mrinal Sen – Calutta Trilogy of the 1970s
3. RG – Partition Trilogy
4. Satyajit Ray – COMMONALITY BETWEEN THE APU
TRILOGY AND THE 19TH CENTURY WOMEN’S QUESTION
AT
 1. Apu and After by Moinak Biswas
2. Neepa Majumdar’s From Neorealism to Melodrama
3. The Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and Apur Sansar
4. The Slate and Globe by Suranjan Ganguly
5. Bazin on Aparajito
6. Art, Vision, and Culture: Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy Revisited
WIMAL DISSANAYAKE
CT
1. Bengali Political Cinema: Protest and Social Transformation by
Naadir Junaid
2. Contribution of Mrinal Sen in Indian Socio - Political Cinema; A
Study of Sen’s Major Socio- Political Films BY Satyajeet Shobha
Shriram1 and Dr. Sumedh2
3. Suranjan Ganguly’s A Cinema on Red Alert
4. Torsa Ghoshal’s Strikethrough Calcutta: Poetics and Politics of
Interruption in Satyajit Ray’s and Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta Trilogies
5. Infernal Encounters: Streets and Interpretation in Mrinal Sen’s
Calcutta Trilogy by Somak Mukherjee
6. Introducing Mrinal Sen by Udayan Gupta
7. Alternative Belonging by Suvadip Sinha
RG
1. Anne Sheridan
2. Naadir Junaid
3. Bhaskar Sarkar
4. Nandini Bhattacharya
5. Moinak Biswas – limits of representation
6. Poulami Chakraborty – The Refugee Woman
7. Manishita Dass – Unsettling Images
8. Diamond Oberoi Vahali’s A semiological study of the cinema of
ritwick ghatak and PARTITION AND THE BETRAYAL OF
INDIA’S INDEPENDENCE: AN ANALYSIS OF RITWIK
GHATAK’S CINEMA
9. Manishita Dass – The cloud-clapped star
10. Of More Than a certain tendency in the indian cinema –
ashish
11. Epilogue: Five Minutes and Fifteen Seconds with Ritwik
Ghatak
12. Ghatak’s cinema and the discoherence of the Bengal Partition
13. Nation and Partition: Tagore Reinvented by Ritwik Ghatak
Manas Ghosh
14. HISTORY, TRAUMA AND REMEMBERING: THE
CONSTRUCTION OF A POSTCOLONIAL BENGALI
CULTURAL IDENTITY IN RITWIK GHATAK’S FILMS
15. Resisting the resistible: re-writing myths of partition in the
works of Ritwik Ghatak Anindya Raychaudhuri*
16. DIS-MEMBERING AND RE-MEMBERING THE ART OF
RITWIK GHATAK
History of Indian television
- Colonial legacy
- Binary of the east and west
- Certain idea of indianness constructed by the colonial elite
(project)
- Politics of nationhood and notion of indianness
- Specifically understand the media policy
- Major argument: state’s homogenizing idea of the audience:
practice of citizenship: makes policy making easy
- From 1959 to emergency to site experiement to pre-1982 asian
games
- Color produced
- Sponsored programmes and LTEs
- Post-1982: opening the flood gets for privatization
- Larger drive for privatization- formal privatization
- Major instances of commercialization
- 1957 – vivid Bharati stations
- Form and tendencies pulling back
- Bringing up television
- William mazarella – representation and constitution
- Hegemonic cultural policy
- Two contradictions: compartmentalization and other concerns
- Folk programmes and other productive diversity
- Diversity in india: couldn’t be conceived: welcome contradiction:
facilitates heterogeneity
- Second contradiction: moralist drive: state as the grand moralizing
agent: film was the major representative of the entertainment
- State’s constituency: broadcast public
- The public
- Radio was not a major constituency of the state.
- Television guided by documentary realism
- VV Keskar – the ban of hindi film songs amd larger moralizing
drama of the state’s reservation against the film, and later, its
sanitization drive.
- Chitrahar – cheap in rate, pressure
- Form conflicted between development, education, and national
integration, and entertainment.
- Not one way ideological traffic, and the instance of the disturbance
of the J.P. Narayan’s rally by the broadcast of the film, a mid-
career Raj Kapoor film Bobby
- Raj Kapoor – represented Nehruvian socialism
- Moralizing project – challenges and contradictions
- Not one way spoon-feeding of an ideology
- 1952 banning and lifting
- Hegemonic project of the state, and the challenges faced – nutshell
– summarize the tension b/w the homogenization and contradiction
- History of Indian television – 1959 – 1982
- Why 1982 is considered to be a threshold?
2. 1980s television
- The negotiation of the welfare state
- Progressive melodrama
- Inhibitions about the entertainment
- 1976 – intro of fictional tv
- Post-asian games- 1982- hum long and buniyad
- Two features of progressive melodrama – lower-strata of the
society and the marginalized
- 2000 to 2008 – k-serials – hindu undivided family dramas
- Rural based- malgudi days.
- Partition: tamas
- Refugee camp – Buniyaad
- Visibility of the public spaces – markets, streets, lumpen
proletariat: not formalized within the codes of bourgeoisie.
- Nukkad – entirely shot in a locality
- Good-hearted drunkard – teacher ji, highest in the hierarchy
- Progressive drama – the legacy of Indian new wave
- Uski roti and bhuvan shome – under the patronage of the state –
socialist-realist – about the reality of the society
- Beaming the nation
- Capital first volume – self-enclosed monocular space – reification
- Benjamin – realm of politics
- Lower economic strata – connection with the lower caste
- Mimesis
- Correspondence with
Mythologicals – Arvind rajagopala
welfare state’s negotiation with the emergent market
maggi – 2-minute video sponsors of ‘hum log’
family-planning message
2-minute video advert – promotes nuclear fam and its values-
Hum log – under the feudal
Strain to harness the extensive values of indianness
- Engaged with ashwin’s critique
- Serials of the 1980s – mythological’s negotiations
- Lost family values – modern – CGI – melodramatic entertainment
– demands of the market
- Ramayana and Mahabharata – major CGI imagery
- The young turk, Rajiv Gandhi – looking forward with the
computers
 - Sam Pitroda – futuristic nation image of the Hindu Right,
contemporary Indian policies – the telecast of the epics – playing
an important role in the emergence of the Hindu Right.
Reason:
i) Same with the filmic modernity
ii) Critique of Rajagopala
iii) The greatest mouthpiece of consumerism – TV
iv) Ancient mythological – reaction to the westernization – back to
the roots
v) Moment of globalization – moment of identity politics
vi) No resistance, no resort to.
vii) Culturally – eric hobbsman – invented traditions
viii) In terms of the market
ix) Greatest mouthpiece of consumerism – goes by the logic of
majority
x) The birth of modern public television – 1987 to 1989
xi) Pulled audience towards consumerism
xii) Consumerist habit – television audience
xiii) Middle-class consolidation
xiv) Hindu epic – liberalization and globalization, majoritarian
focus, and religiousness.
xv) Why at all Ramayana and Mahabharata? – negotiation with
development, education, national integration, and entertainment.
xvi) Fiction is the proof of the fall
News
Fcosu – quasi executive – sting operation, investigative operation
Quasi judicial – trial by media
Quasi legislative – communicative architecture
---
Quasi-executive – sensationalization – charge of liveliness
Spectacle of democracy
Reality
Participatory culture
1990s – Indian idol 3 – identity politics – focus
Reflect on consumerism – the role of the middle class – inter-
constitutive
Middle-class – sleeping lion
Jassi JAISI Koi Nahi – middle-class – only narrativizable class – tells
the story of transformation
Home becomes the site of desirable consumer
Shaanti, Junnoon, and Khandar
Advertisements reflect the interior of the melodrama
Home
- Implosion of the credit market – consumerist
- From market place and squallers to home
- Dresses, table cloth
- Home becomes the site and repository
- Consumerist form
- Yeh to hai zindagi – commentary on the scooter and the fridge
- Heart of the progressive melodrama – breaking
- Home – major signifier
 - Participatory culture – point of query – middle class and
consumerism
- Middle-class and participation – Ashwin – commentary
Sum-up
1. State’s drive to homogenize the audience and the
2. 1980s’ tv as a negotiation b/w the state and the market
3. News tv: quasi-executive
4. Participatory culture: middle-class and consumerism
- Tangentially refer to consumerism, middle-class, and identity
politics
- Moral universe – referred
- Chastity
- Relate consumerism, market, and the hindu right
- Inter-constitutive relationship
- Visual is the caption of the sonic
- Documentary realism practice of the Indian public tv.
- Tv – constituency of the state
- Programme image

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