COMMENTARY

For a Political Cinema to Come

Moinak Biswas

It has been a universal tendency

of market forms to assimilate
styles, techniques and themes of
the minority alternative films.
This has led to a diversification of
the modes of film-making in
India, sometimes with very
interesting results, and certainly,
to significant technical and
stylistic achievements. This
article, which draws attention to
the refashioning of the
conventional cinema in the
aftermath of the demise of the
parallel-mainstream division in
India, focuses on two questions.
Does the idea of the popular
cinema itself survive the end of
the great divide? Can it really
assimilate the political charge of
the oppositional cinema?

olitical film-making and alternative cinema have been closely connected in India. The current crisis
of the political film, therefore, should
owe as much to the institutional crisis
of alternative film practices as to the
exhaustion of a mode of radical political
imagination. The near absence of political film-making in India (I am speaking
here of the industrial fiction films,
not documentaries) corresponds to the
absence of an alternative film sector in
the industry. The last appears especially
strange in the light of the fact that we
produce 1,000 odd feature films a year
in several languages, with a remarkable
concentration of skills and talent in
the major production centres; and also
in view of the fact that, independent
artistic schools of film-making have
experienced a worldwide resurgence
over the last two decades, with Asia
playing a major part. India has managed
to remain unaffected, while Iran, China,
Korea, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam
have made major contributions to this
resurgence.
An Overview

Moinak Biswas (moinak.biswas@gmail.com)

is at the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur
University, Kolkata.
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

august 16, 2014

To give a quick historical overview:

the alternative cinema went into a
general decline in the late 1980s. By the
first years of the following decade, its
institutional support began to be withdrawn in a systematic manner. The
National Film Development Corporation, and then the national television
(Doordarshan) retreated from patronage.
National awards and festival support
also became uncertain. The more curious thing, however, was the loss of
critical support. A turn came in critical
discourse that started debunking the
modernising state exactly around the
same time as the neo-liberal onslaught
on the latter began.
We still have not owned up to this historical convergence. It was not a convergence of interests for sure, but one still
needs to put the overlap in perspective.
vol xlIX no 33

The new discourses of cultural theory

(a close kin of academic film studies as
the latter emerged in India in the 1990s)
produced a deep scepticism about the
states role in building cultural modernity,
about national reconstruction models
along the lines of state-sponsored development, about narrative realism, etc
all in one breath. This discourse gained
currency around the same time as the
new economic wisdom mounted a severe attack on the protectionist state in
the name of free market.
It did not take much time for the last
vestiges of the Indian New Wave and
the institutionally-sponsored alternative
cinema to disintegrate. The market became the singular field of play for all
kinds of fiction film-making. The economic dispensation was enough to effect
this transformation, but what is disconcerting is the new critical doxa that
attended it, and continues to hold sway
even today. In the context of a definite
triumph of the market forms, it has come
to equate art (cinema) with elitism, and
conversely, shows a general inability to
form aesthetic judgment in relation to
commercial forms of expression.
This is peculiar to Indian film scholarship as it stands now. Questions of
aesthetics and artistic alternatives have
not been rendered so irrelevant in any
other critical tradition. Film studies,
as it developed in India in the 1990s,
found this as a natural environment. Its
achievements are a different matter, but
one needs to revisit the original impulses behind the critical commonplaces
that informed a major part of the output
if one is to speak of the connected crisis
of alternative and political film-making.
The equation between an ideology of the
state, for instance, and cultural production receiving support from state-aided
institutions, the view of the state itself as
harbouring a uniform ideological programme rather than as a site of contending demands, and further along the axis,
the equation between forms of narration
(most often the realist alternatives) and
nation-building developmentalist initiatives of the government have been too
easily accepted, without paying attention to the question of the internal logics
of these categories.
23

COMMENTARY

This could be debated on another

occasion. I would like to draw attention
here to the refashioning of the conventional cinema itself in the aftermath of
the demise of parallel-mainstream division. It has been a universal tendency of
the market forms to assimilate styles,
techniques and themes of the minority
alternative films in the contemporary
phase of capitalism. This has led to a
diversification of the modes of filmmaking in India, sometimes with very
interesting results, and certainly, to significant technical and stylistic achievements. But for our present purpose,
two important questions stand out.
Does the idea of the popular cinema
itself survive the end of the great
divide? And can it really assimilate
the political charge of the oppositional
cinema? I believe the answer is negative
in both cases.
Sometime around the middle of the
1990s, corporatisation of financing, new
exhibition modes like the multiplex
theatre and electronic media, and transnational marketing began to shape a
new urban form of the conventional
Bombay, Tamil or Telugu film that
did not seem to need the presumed
people of the popular culture theory
as its addressee. Big industrial cinema
became the elite cinema in India, participating deeply in the formation of
the post-liberalisation citizen. This is
why it is now possible to adopt a
mode retro, both in films and in critical
work, vis--vis the 1970s, and even the
1980s. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2006) has
called this process Bollywoodisation
of Indian cinema.
Political Crisis
But I am not thinking of the typical song
and dance entertainment here. The
political crisis is exemplified in the more
curious development of what I would
like to call a social cinema. The conventional cinema has not only shown
the ability to absorb the generic elements of the art cinema, it has also developed an interest in socially responsible content. I am thinking of both films
that deal with systemic issues with
political overtones such as Nayak (2001),
Rang De Basanti (2006) or No One Killed
24

Jessica (2011), and those with issues

of human urgency exemplified best
by what Madhava Prasad (2013), has
recently called the rare disease film,
e g, Black (2005), Tare Zamin Par (2007),
My Name Is Khan (2010) or Barfi (2012),
where individual disability extends
from congenital illnesses to alternative
sexual orientation. Politics is elided in
this cinema, which seems to respond to
the demands of a post-political order. A
cinema of consensus is born. One cannot
imagine a possible disagreement about
the problem or the message. Who does
not agree, including the corrupt, that
India suffers from corruption? Or that
the physically disabled should be treated
in a humane manner?
The new legitimacy of commercial
cinema is exemplified by the fact that,
for the first time in the history of Indian
cinema, it is not attended by a social
divide in reception. The age of censure
is over, the secret pleasures of nonlegitimate entertainment gone; even
cultural divides between generations no
longer matter. Teachers and parents
urge their wards to go watch the Bombay film with edifying message. One has
begun to miss the irresponsible cinema
that could still laugh at edification, the
last good instances of which David
Dhawan sometimes produced with the
actor Govinda.
Diversification of the commercial modes
has indeed created the space for more
serious engagement with political issues,
recent examples of which would be
Peepli Live (2010), and especially, Matru
ki Bijli ka Mandola (2013). These films
do seem to effectively bear the legacy
of 1970s political cinema. But the challenge before political film-making as
alternative cinema today seems to be
how not to reduce the political contradiction into perennial social and moral
issues, and not to use allegory as a solution a tendency that continues to dog
these occasional, cinematically more
exciting attempts.
I would like to suggest that it is
precisely by turning to social issues, or
rather, by turning the world into issues,
by staging problems in their recognisable form and prompting opinions,
that the political, the irresolvable
august 16, 2014

conflicts sustaining apparent social

unities, is pushed out of reckoning. In
this sense, the new social cinema is
non-political. Issues here have the same
valence as development or bourgeois
democracy, on which no opinionating
agent allows him/herself a disagreement
any longer. On the other hand, the
new valorisation of ethics often works
against political consciousness. Jacques
Ranciere, among others, has shown in
his recent work how this ethical turn
has become synonymous with the culture of consensus (Ranciere 2009). It
should not be surprising that the social
cinema does not require alternative systems of production support.
It can be argued that the new mass
entertainment in cinema is premised on
the luxury of ignoring the dispersed,
heterogeneous masses, the people of
the escapist popular cinema, as its
implied addressee. Instead, it draws a
boundary around a familiar society to
which it speaks confidently, if necessary, by using English as a major vehicle
for communication, using idioms of
fashion, food, courtship or humour that
clearly point to a community of citizens
passing through familiar rituals of
contemporary capitalism. This is radically different in nature from the popular
cinema of the period between the 1950s
and early 1990s. There is hardly any
point in using the word popular for the
contemporary industrial mainstream,
or continue to study it within the paradigms of popular culture.
Reinvention of Political Films
But this does not mean that the reinvention of political film-making, which also
means a reinvention of an alternative
film tradition, would entail a return to
the people it used to imagine for itself.
Gilles Deleuze made an observation in
his second book on cinema, Cinema 2:
The Time Image (1985), that could help
us think through the difficult question of
the community that such reinvention
has the task of forming. Deleuze says
the first big difference between classical
and modern cinema is that in classical
cinema the people are there, even though
they are oppressed, tricked, subject, even
though blind or unconscious. For the
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Economic & Political Weekly

COMMENTARY

Soviet or American cinema before the

second world war, there is a unanimity
about the emergence or the existence of
a people, the people are already there,
real before actual, ideal without being
abstract. In the post-war formation of
the modern cinema, a transition that the
two cinema books by Deleuze study,
true political cinema could be made on
the premise that the people no longer
exist, or not yetthe people are missing.
In the west, this truth is hidden by
mechanisms of power and the systems
of majority, but in the third world, it
was absolutely clear, where oppressed
and exploited nations remained in a state
of perpetual minorities, in a collective
identity crisis. (C)inematographic art,
he goes on to write,
(m)ust take part in this task: not that of
addressing a people, which is presupposed
already there, but contributing to the invention of a people. The moment the master,
the coloniser, proclaims There have never
been people here, the missing people are a
becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty
towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of a struggle to which a necessarily
political art must contribute (Deleuze 2005).

These words relate to post-war modernist cinema and the period of decolonisation in the third world, but they remain
deeply relevant to a possible critique of a
social cinema that works on the basis
of unanimity about a globalised socius,
imagines a circle of spectators now
transnationally identified as Indian
through the new identity-making fostered by the media complex. Such unity
should be missing, Deleuze warns us.
One could add that the schemes of simple reversal should also be missing to a
truly political cinema. Problems, in other words, should not appear in finished
shapes, already formulated, to be resolved by amelioration. This assumes the
false unity of a society, and is by nature
anti-political. By the same logic, political
cinema cannot adopt similar means of
positing issues and resolving them by reversing the usual, predominant position.
This should be extended to the confident realism that the new commercial
cinema has apparently inherited from the
older art film, rendering it irrelevant. I am
reminded of an interview by the German
film-maker and writer Alexander Kluge,
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

august 16, 2014

who became close to his old teacher

Theodore Adorno in the 1960s. As it is
well known, Adorno was plainly hostile
to cinema, for which he could not see an
escape from pure commodity existence.
In his late essay, Transparencies on
Film (1966), he wrote that the
mimetic impulsesprior to all content and
meaning, incite viewers and listeners to fall
into step as if in a parade. Through (the)
very act of seemingly photocopying the
world, the world as it exists now is affirmed
and re-affirmed.

But he said something interesting to

Kluge apropos the latters nine-hour film
about the student movement in Frankfurt, which Kluge reported in an interview in 2003. Adorno said to him they
should film blind, if someone records
without intention then something will
always be tracked down (Leslie 2005).
An extreme position as it might seem
to be, it captures a well-known problem
about the claim of films to serve up
reality as a set of self-evident themes.
Blind filming, Adorno thought, could
introduce the negative into this aesthetics
of affirmation. Film is also what falls
between the images (ibid). One should
remember this in the face of a deep satisfaction developed by the educated urban
intelligentsia in India about films that
talk about serious social issues. The
latter does not guarantee either artistic
standard or political insight. The articulate classes, deeply satisfied with the
social film today, are responsible for
not only a politically inert cinema, but
aesthetic bluntness perpetuated across
the industry. The uneducated masses
do not seem to influence cinematic taste
any more, it is the urban elite that
patronises the coarse sentimentalism of
a Black or the theatrical patriotism of
Rang De Basanti. Without an introduction of absence into the picture that seems
to give us transparencies of social life no
creative breakthrough seems possible.
On-screen and
Off-screen Realities
There are indeed cinemas that have
emerged across the world in the last two
decades, deeply committed to places,
bodies and specific histories, which
invite the viewer to contribute to the
vol xlIX no 33

image and the narrative by inhabiting

what falls between images, what lies
outside their visible content. Abbas
Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry 1997; The
Wind Will Carry Us 1999) and Hou
Hsiao-hsien (The Puppetmaster 1993,
Millennium Mambo 2001) create unfinished films that present sets of virtual
relations between on-screen and offscreen realities. The viewer has to play
off those potential relations against each
other and contribute to the unfolding of
the film actively, she has to make a film
of her own as it were, rather than receive
finished resolutions from the screen.
Michael Haneke (Code Unknown 2000;
Cache 2005; White Ribbon 2009) makes
use of what falls between images in a
more directly political manner. He
has perfected the method of allowing
historical trauma to haunt the screen
rather than appear on it as plotted subject matter, which is in direct opposition
to the sociality of representation and
direct recognition.
Adopting an entirely different approach, the Dardenne Brothers of Belgium
have shown the possibility of politically
engaging with homelessness, unemployment and work in a body of films
(Rossetta 1999; The Child 2002; The Son
2005). They use informal handheld
mobile filming, eliminate the narrative
frame that could provide an explanatory
framework within the film, and capture
the new conditions of labour in the immediacy of their unfolding. They have
brought their documentary film-making
experience into a narrative experiment
that presents a direct perception of
work, the kind of work that now constitutes what some economists call the global precariat, labouring in offices, shops
and homes on daily wages, under the
constant threat of unemployment.
Time-Image Cinemas
There is also an art cinema movement
that has emerged in the same period,
from the ashes of the earlier art-house
cinema as it were. This has earned the
misleading name of slow cinema in
recent critical discussions. It is an extreme form of what Deleuze called a
cinema of the time-image, a mode
born out of the essential dissociation of
25

COMMENTARY

the integrity of action, character and

movement. Freeing time from its subservience to plot and action, this cinema allows duration to take on a concrete
shape on screen, and as a corollary,
withdraws from the simple causality of
action. The process of contemplation
that takes over is not routed through a
consciousness centred in character or
anchored to an authorial perspective.
Instead, it tends to find an embodiment
in space, in the landscape itself.
This cinema certainly seems to value
aesthetic strategy over content, but in
the best examples of the kind, it works at
dismantling the communicative transparency and the utility of messages even
as it moves into a close contact with lives
and neighbourhoods rendered useless,
falling by the wayside of the new tracks
of commerce. Jia Zhangke in China,
Tsai Ming-liang in Taiwan, Apichatpong
Weerasethakul in Thailand, Nuri Bilge
Ceylan in Turkey, Bela Tarr in Hungary,
Pedro Costa in Portugal, Carlos Reygadas
in Mexico have all adopted this aesthetic
of a time out of step with the clock of
development and commodity production. The migrant labourer, the peasant,
the casual worker, the small-time trader
people the world of these films. The
quintessential image is the jobless figure, migrating to the city, stuck in his
tracks somewhere in the middle, interminably waiting.
The mannered silence and slow movement of this cinema has exasperated
many. Following an outburst in a Sight &
Sound editorial in 2010, a debate ensued
on the slow cinema in the blogosphere,
joined by critics like Steven Shaviro,
Mathew Flanagan and John Tuttle
(James 2010; Tuttle 2010; Shaviro 2010;
Flanagan 2012). What was missing in
that debate, however, is the question
why this style has been adopted by so
many important film-makers in the
recent years, and why it has emerged as
a global phenomenon. These are more
important issues for us than that of
idealisation of a style, which may develop its own problem of atrophy. A global
aesthetic of this sort cannot come into
being through the conspiracy of film
festivals, as some critics seem to think.
As film-makers look for alternatives
26

across the world, they encounter multidirectional flows of styles without a time
lag. Digital copies and torrent downloads of films, and instantly travelling
critical commentaries reach the unlikeliest
locations in no time today. Cheap, handy
tools make production easier to undertake, and most importantly, an international community of viewers free the
film-makers from the dependence on
often hostile local markets. A desire to
see a global alternative emerge is no
longer separated from that of forming
alternatives to ones own national community of viewers and critics.

this tendency can be traced down to

contemporary film-makers like Amit
Dutta (Aadmi ki Aurat aur Anya Kahaniyan 2009), Gurvinder Singh (Anhe Ghora
da Daan 2011) and Gyan Correa (The
Good Road 2013). Whether in Adoor
Gopalakrishnans Rat Trap (Elippathayam
1981), the study of a decaying feudal
household falling into morbid languor, or
in Mani Kauls films that self-avowedly
turned time rather the image into the
substance of a non-dramatic, contemplative narration, cinematic duration
speaks of the asynchrony upon which
aesthetic and political alternatives now
show a tendency to converge.

Conclusions
The Indian alternative to come may not
necessarily repeat these exact tendencies,
but the quick flow and inter-connectedness
of film styles across the world indeed
make such affiliations possible. The rediscovery of political and alternative filmmaking in India may as well emerge on the
basis of the low cost digital film-making,
a film practice that is everyday and
mobile in nature and moves everywhere.
It may find in the cinema of the Dardenne
Brothers a close ally. The cinema of duration, on the other hand, also has a history
in Indian cinema. In fact, one of the
legacies the Indian New Wave that was
never assimilated by the new commercial
cinema of social responsibility and
cannot indeed be assimilated by it is
the treatment of time found in a significant body of films from the 1970s on.
Starting with Mani Kauls Uski Roti (1970)
and Kumar Shahanis Maya Darpan (1972),

References
Deleuze, Gilles (2005): Cinema 2: The Time Image,
Chapter 8, (trans) Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (London; Continuum Books).
Flanagan, Mathew (2012): Slow Cinema: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and
Experimental Film, thesis submitted to University of Exeter, UK (available: https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10036/4432.
James, Nick (2010): Passive Aggressive, Sight &
Sound, April.
Leslie, Esther (2005): Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht
and Film in Mike Wayne (ed.), Understanding
Film, Marxist Perspectives (London: Pluto Press).
Prasad, Madhava (2013): Diverting Diseases in
Meheli Sen and Anustup Basu (ed.), Figurations in Indian Film (New York: Palgrave MacMillan).
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish (2006): The Bollywoodisation of Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in
a Global Arena in Preben Kaarsholm (ed.),
City Flicks, Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Ranciere, Jacques (2009): The Ethical Turn in
Aesthetics and Politics in Aesthetics and Its
Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Shaviro, Steven (2010): Slow Cinema vs Fast
Films, www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=891, May.
Tuttle, Harry (2010): Slow Films Easy Life, unspokencinema.blogspot.in/2010/05/slow-filmseasy-life-sight.html, May.

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