Film & Media Studies - Page 4

Melancholic Vision and Utopian Imagination: Amma Ariyan and Left-wing Culture in Kerala in the 1970s

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P. Muhammed Afzal

Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani), Pilani, Rajasthan, India-333031. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9989-6251. Email: muhammed.p@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.42   

Abstract

Situating the Malayalam film Amma Ariyan in the context of radical Left politics in Kerala during the “long 1970s”, this paper argues that Left-wing cultural productions during the period offered a melancholic vision of history that sustained a utopian imagination. In popular discussions, the 1970s is seen as a period of “misguided adventurism” and defeat, and the nostalgia for the period is treated as a paralyzing, backward looking attitude.  Drawing on contemporary scholarship on Left melancholy, nostalgia, and utopia, this paper looks back at the 1970s from a perspective where melancholia is a stance that offers a critical vision of the past as well as the future. This paper argues that the “failed heroes” in Left-wing cultural productions in the 1970s refused to “resign themselves to … the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities”. This “refusal to be realistic” has been very central to the sustaining of a utopian imagination which acquires more significance in the context of the perceived reactivation of “communist desire” in the contemporary times.

Keywords: Amma Ariyan, Radical Left, Left Melancholy, Malayalam Cinema, Kerala

Neoliberal Cricketing Subjects in Contemporary India: The State-Market Dichotomy in Two Cricket Movies

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238 views

Rakesh Ramamoorthy

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Mar Ivanios College (Autonomous), Kerala, India. Email:  rakeshmoorthy@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2355-1054

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.41  

 Abstract

This essay examines the ways in which two popular cricket movies from India — the Hindi movie Iqbal (2005) and the Tamil movie Jeeva (2014) — validate the tenets of “roll-back neoliberalism”  (Peck and Tickell 2002), an ideology that calls for the withdrawal of State-regulatedwelfare mechanisms in favour of free market capitalism. The protagonists of these movies are talented cricketers from underprivileged backgrounds, and they are excluded from regional and national teams by corrupt cricket board officials. This essay critiques a common story arc that these narratives share: the protagonists are quintessentially neoliberal entrepreneurial subjects who overcome the marginalization through adept exploitation of commercial potential of the sport. The argument is that the discursive delegitimization of State intervention in cricket, and the concomitant framing of the free market as a progressive and inclusive entity, are disempowering for the cricketing public. While a State-regulated sporting culture does have its exclusionary aspects, this essay contends, contrapuntally, that the neoliberal validation of the free-market rationale can be problematic in that it absolves the State of the responsibility of fostering an inclusive cricketing culture. This study thus offers a contingent and strategic endorsement of the Indian State’s intervention in the nation‘s cricketing cultures.

Keywords: Indian cricketing nationalisms, neoliberalism, caste and cricket, Iqbal, Jeeva

Infidelity to True Story and Novel: Locating the Auteur in Rituparno Ghosh’s Dahan

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414 views

Akaitab Mukherjee

Assistant Professor, School of Social Sciences and Languages (SSL), Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Chennai Campus, Tamil Nadu, India, akaitab.mukherjee@gmail.com, ORCID id-0000-0001-6410-9898

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.42

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Abstract

Rituparno Ghosh (1961-2013), a celebrated Bengali film director who started making films in 90s, often borrows plots from literary and other cultural narratives.  The essay aims to explicate Ghosh’s early film Dahan (1997) which is an adaptation of distinguished Bengali novelist Suchitra Bhattacharya’s novel with the same title. Bhattacharya’s novel is influenced by the real incident in which a couple was harassed by four youths at Tollygunge Metro Station in Kolkata on 27th November, 1992. The film also acknowledges that it is indebted to the true story. The essay explicates the adaptation of the two sources by the auteur. It examines the duplication of authorial concerns in this adaptation while following the narratives of two texts. Ghosh remains unfaithful to the literary text and the cultural memory of the true story to establish his authorship. As Ghosh’s films portray the middle-class women in a patriarchal society, following Janet Staiger’s reconsideration of the theory of auteur in the context of queer movement and identity politics in the 1970s, the essay argues that the performance of infidelity to the literary and true story to establish authorship is auteur’s “technique of the self”.

Keywords: Auteur, fidelity, Dahan, Based on true story, Rituparno Ghosh

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“He made me fall at the feet of a woman”: Masculine Anxieties and Dysfunctional Romance in Tamil Cult Film Subramaniyapuram (2008)

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393 views

Divya A

Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. ORCID: 0000-0002-4516-6763. Email: divya@iitm.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.38

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Abstract

Tamil Cinema is “one of India’s largest, most prolific and increasingly significant cinemas” (Velayutham 2008, pp.1-2). Madurai genre in Tamil films is popularly known as 3M films (Murder, Mayhem and Madurai) (Damodaran Gorringe 2017, p.9). Subramaniyapuram (Sasikumar, 2008) is a Madurai film that attained cult status in both the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala since its release in 2008. A collection of essays on Subramaniyapuram edited by anthropologist Anand Pandian was published in 2013, a rare honour to be bestowed on a Tamil film in recent times. Significantly, the film’s problematic gender narrative—especially the entangled relation between the romantic plot and the masculine “plots”—is not the central subject of exploration of any of the essays in this edited collection, nor has it been discussed in depth in any critical discourse on the film so far. In this article, using Laura Mulvey’s theoretical lens as a point of departure, I argue that the female identity is crucial to the narrative functioning of the various plots of Subramaniyapuram. The film’s ultimate narrative desires, I illustrate, are in affirmation of masculine supremacy, hegemonic masculinity, and the women as femme fatales.

Keywords: Subramaniyapuram, Madurai, Tamil cinema, Masculinity, Gaze, Mulvey, Sasikumar, Romantic plot.

Victimhood, Health Challenges and Violent Restiveness in Blood and Oil: Music, Characterization and Colours as Metaphors

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257 views

Uche-Chinemere Nwaozuzu1, Adebowale O. Adeogun2, Cindy Ezeugwu3, Alphonsus C. Ugwu4 & Emeka Aniago5

1Associate Professor, Theatre & Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

2Senior Lecturer, Music, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

3Lecturer, Theatre & Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

4Lecturer, Mass Communication, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

5Senior Lecturer, Theatre & Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria. ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3194-1463. Email: emeka.aniago@unn.edu.ng 

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.36

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 Abstract

This study examines the aesthetics, efficacy, and propriety of the embedded metaphors in characterization, music, and colour application as creative vision in projecting victimhood atmosphere around traumatized Niger-Deltans due to many years of deprivation in Blood and Oil. Thus, this study explains how Blood and Oil represents a credible narrative, subsuming polemics of environmental degradation, health misery, massive unemployment, subjugation, and violent restiveness in Niger Delta due to poor political leadership, greed, and corruption. On creative vision, we are discussing how the ingenious application of characterization, music, and colour combined effectively in creating an enduring mood for the scenes in the film as channels of accentuating intended messages. To add relevant scholarly rigor, we applied victimhood theory and interpretive discuss approach to create relevant and lucid insights regarding the inclinations and actions of select characters in the film as well as analysis of relevant secondary texts. In the end, we deduce that the apt portrayal of Niger-Delta oil communities’ extensively degraded and polluted environment validates the reality of anguish and victimhood because of the massively diminished fishing and farming prospects. Lastly, the implication of this scenario is increased unemployment, psychological distress, diseases, and violent restiveness which have reduced enormously the wellbeing of Niger Delta inhabitants.  

Keywords: crude oil, health concerns, Niger-Delta, Nollywood, restiveness, victimhood

Performance Space of the Digital Performer/Reader inside Andy Campbell and Judi Alston’s Digital Fiction the Nightingale’s Playground

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281 views

Gitanjali Roy

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Liberal Arts, ICFAI University, Tripura. Research Scholar, Dept of English, Tripura University. ORCID: 0000-0003-3672-3481. E-mail: itzgitz@gmail.com/gitanjaliroy@iutriipura.edu.in 

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.32

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 Abstract:

A digital performer has to negotiate with different kinds of affordances inside the space of a digital text. The Nightingale’s Playground (2010), a digital fiction authored by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston offers the reader/player with four versions of the text centering on the protagonist Carl Robertson who tries hard to search for his lost school friend Alex Nightingale. The online texts (‘Consensus Trance’, ‘Fieldwork Book’) and the gaming version of the digital fiction (‘Consensus Trance II’) offer the reader different decisional platforms. This makes it a challenging task for the reader to connect the affordances of the digital text. At the same time, the offline pdf version of the digital fiction hints at Carl being affected by a psychological disorder. The paper shall focus on how a digital reader negotiates his/her position inside the digital text by decoding the programmer’s/author’s encoded plot.

Keywords: Digital, Performer, Text, Nightingale’s Playground, Reader, Player.

Laughing out Loud: The Popular Politics of Schadenfreude in Joker

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246 views

Nishat Atiya Shoilee

Lecturer, Department of English and Humanities, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. ORCID: 0000-0002-7170-5513. Email: nishat.atiya@ulab.edu.bd

 Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.45

Laughing out Loud: The Popular Politics of Schadenfreude in Joker

Abstract

This research attempts to identify and analyze the relatively less explored aspects of schadenfreude as a primary currency in an American attention economy as depicted in the 2019 movie, Joker. It discusses how the protagonist’s comedic ambition to become a live performer falls short of its aim, as he feels inclined to embrace the negativity bias in his city and its questionable amusement impulses. Maintaining the appealing and appalling forces of liking and disliking; the deservingness of others’ good and bad fortunes; desirability for self-evaluation; rivalry and intergroup factors- the paper pursues schadenfreude as the masses’ new opiate. It analyzes the American renaissance of self-effacement and public humiliation in light of its mass media environment that had been abandoning meaningful stories for ticklish delights since the mid-nineties. Both primary and secondary data are used to reinforce an end result which takes the current glocal reality to be the distinct creation of a bizarre comedic moment that both defies and weaponizes a mediafication of its consumers’ emotional health.

Keywords: Schadenfreude, comedy, laughter, American humor, sociopolitical identity, transgression

The audience and the star: Genre as the interface and expectation-fulfillment as the catalyst of their relationship

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293 views

Bikash Ch. Bhowmick

Assistant Professor, Department of Media Studies and Journalism, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). ORCID: 0000-0003-0830-1986. Email: bikash.bhowmick@ulab.edu.bd,

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.36
The audience and the star: Genre as the interface and expectation-fulfillment as the catalyst of their relationship

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between a film audience and a film star. It assumes that the genre is a common ground or interface where an actor – who then becomes the star, and an audience meet together and afterward the expectations of that audience become the key player to push forward the relationship between them. In forging the relationship between two parties, the genre takes the responsibility of constructing an actor’s star-personality and of shaping the spectator’s size of a distinct kind. To substantiate the argument, the essay discusses audiences’ inscribed entity and construction of a star under the title ‘the star – a construction of the negotiations’; the dynamics of their relationship under the title ‘audience expectation and their relationship with the Star’ and finally, in conclusion, it highlights the genre’s intermediary contribution to the relationship. The author has taken the critical/theoretical approach; therefore heavily relied on existing literature and theories (e.g. psychoanalysis, star theory).  Primary data has also been used in support of the arguments. Survey questionnaires and in-depth interviews have been used as methods of primary data collection.

Keywords: audience, expectation-fulfillment, catalyst, genre, relationship, star

Melodrama, Ascetic Modality, and Communist Self-fashioning: Mukhamukham and the Communist Hero in Malayalam Cinema

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383 views

P. Muhammed Afzal

Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sceinces, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani), Pilani, Rajasthan, India-333031. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9989-6251. E-mail: muhammed.p@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.30

Melodrama, Ascetic Modality, and Communist Self-fashioning: Mukhamukham and the Communist Hero in Malayalam Cinema

Abstract

This paper treats the Malayalam film Mukhamukham and the debates it engendered in the Kerala public sphere about the history and legacy of communism as an archive of passions and disavowals that have shaped the political subjectivities in contemporary Kerala and explores how the film offers a critique of the Left popular in Kerala. Through a critique of the ascetic modality of the communist hero, Mukhamukham offers a critique of the representative strategies through which the communist hero was produced in the early Left political melodramas in Malayalam, which have been a significant part of the Left’s constitutive role in the construction of the domain of the popular in Kerala. The attempt in this paper is to read the film as one that, while marked by liberal prejudices, offers a critique of the Left popular and certain prevailing notions on the Left in Kerala. The paper explores how the film represents the figure of the revolutionary; and the shift from the melodramatic conventions of the construction of the revolutionary figure that Gopalakrishnan attempts in the film.

Keywords: melodrama, Left popular, Communist self-fashioning, Malayalam cinema, Kerala

COVID-19 and the Entertainment Industries in Nigeria

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V.O Eze1, Uche Uwaezuoke Okonkwo2, Cindy Anene Ezeugwu3 Chinyere Christiana Ukwueze4 and Felicia O. Ezeugwu5

1 Department of General Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, virginia.eze@unn.edu.ng.

2Department of History, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, ucheokonkwo2007@yahoo.com (Corresponding author)

3Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka cindyj246@gmail.com

4Department of Music, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, chinyere.ukwueze@unn.edu.ng

5Department of Music, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, felicia.ezeugwu@unn.edu.ng

 Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.09
COVID-19 and the Entertainment Industries in Nigeria

Abstract

This paper examines not only on the socio-economic implication of the lockdown on practitioners in the entertainment industry namely the cinema halls, live performances, and the film industries among others, but also it explores the ways E-entertainment was being introduced especially in music and drama industry. With the lockdown orchestrated by the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak in Nigeria, show lovers were being entertained through E-concerts, drive in theatre performances, and television live shows like Owambe and Pepsi Dance Party that was being showed every weekend with the audience responding on face book, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms among others. The research method is qualitative and analytical. The study employed a survey method of data collection to gather relevant material from published and unpublished materials in hard and soft copies which included online materials. The material was analyzed through mixed-method, which involved description, explanation, translation, and interpretation. The result showed that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted negatively the entertainment industry, bringing to a halt the performer/audience physical participation and interaction and a lot of reduction in the socio-economic progress of entertainers and the entertainment industry depends on their audience for finance. It also opened up the need for the entertainment industry to focus more on the acquisition of E-entertainment facilities to bridge the gap between the entertainers and the audiences on a larger scale to take care of pandemic incidents like COVID-19.

Keywords: Entertainment, Music, Lockdown, Covid-19, Pandemic, Fans, Artistes

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