Film

Marginalised in the New Wave Tamil Film: Subaltern Aspirations in three films by Bala, Kumararaja and Mysskin

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Sreeram Gopalkrishnan

Symbiosis International University, sreeram.gopalkrishnan@scmc.edu.in, Orcid id https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9360-365X. Scopus id 56659374000

Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.03

Abstract

In the last decade a new kind of Tamil film was noticed, widely celebrated as new wave, neo-noir, ‘Madurai genre’ and even as a backlash to the ‘Rasigar Mandram’(Fan Clubs) Stars of mainstream cinema. The rise of such films was in itself an achievement considering the commercial stranglehold of the politico-cultural ecosystem in the Tamil film industry. The new directors moved away from the bubble of ‘mass scene’(grand super hero entry scene) appearances, political innuendos, super star ‘punch’ dialogues and fan club worship of pouring milk on opening day giant-size ‘cutouts’. What the new Tamil films did portray were marginalized, subaltern low-caste characters with aspirations built around grim storylines, expository dialogues and dark themes. This article endeavors to thematically analyse three ‘new wave’ Tamil films and trace the underlying strains of a new generation narrative drawn out from the dirty underbelly of ‘post-Dravidian Rajni-persona Superstar cinema’.

 Keywords: Tamil New Wave, Neo Noir, Marginalised, Film, Caste, Rajini-persona

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Psyche and Hester, or Apotheosis and Epitome: Natural Grace, la Sagésse Naturale

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Anthony Splendora, Independent Scholar, Pennsylvania, USA

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Human interpretation fails, for a turbulent life-situation has arisen that refuses to fit any of the traditional meanings assigned to it. It is a moment of collapse. We sink into a final depth — Apuleius calls it “a kind of voluntary death.” . . . This is the archetype of meaning, just as the anima is the archetype of life itself.

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. . . if it is true that man is capable of everything horrible, it is also true that the horrible always engenders counterforces and that in most epochs of atrocious occurrences the great vital forces of the human soul reveal themselves: love and sacrifice, heroism in the service of conviction, and the ceaseless search for possibilities of a purer existence.

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Somewhere, if not in the New England of his time, Hawthorne unearthed the image of a goddess supreme in beauty and power.

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Overview: Striking Isomorphism

A literary creation of profound cultural significance, the courageous and attractive, healthily libidinous young woman of whom I write is rhetorical to a time and artistic milieu earlier than her author’s and much earlier than ours. Projected novelistically in a tale of waywardness, epic but sublimated love, suffering, exemplary penance, fortitude and triumph, she appears at the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. She is referred to internally as a “destined prophetess” – externally as the “emergent divinity” of that latter, dawning era, and her forbidden love affair with a divine, fair-haired boy of the conservative, male-dominated religious establishment, her engagement in quite specific disobedience to its strictures, has echoes of other famously fallen, transitional women of incalculable cultural-historical sentence. Punishment for the complications arising from her transgression, a hieros gamos, is forthcoming, as it is to those other notorious females, but her godly, complicit lover suffers a grievous wound as well. Imbued by Nature, however, with the earthy, miraculous virtues and resilience of organically natural grace, she endures her initiatory ordeal and eventually prevails. Moreover, her recognition as harbinger of the forthcoming awareness, and her adherence to its mandate, elevate her to fulfillment of her own prophecy: hers is an ascension that heralds the decline and final collapse of the consecrated establishment that sanctioned her. In being doubly mythologized – for ideologically-defined immorality before her ascension and in universal sanctification after, her experience also carries allegorical implications specific to the troubled time of her authorial creation. In addition, her secretive liaison with divinity results in the production of a famous and aptly-named child, a projective symbol of life and fulfillment transcending that superannuating ideology. Keep Reading

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Clothes Make the (Wo)Man: Eighteenth-Century Materialism and the Creation of the Female Subject

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Aubrey L. C. Mishou, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland

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At once controversial for the change in their construction, and useful in terms of creation the female shape and subject, women’s clothing comes to play a large role in the creation of the female subject in eighteenth-century English novels.  Female authors and clothing manufacturers alike utilize the subject of clothing in order to create an autonomous space for the female body.  By manipulating the means through which their body may be read (i.e. through clothing and undergarments), women gain a kind of power that reflects their emerging status as consumers and individuals. “Clothes Make the (Wo)Man,” argues that authors such as Lady Montague and Samuel Richardson utilize the theme of female clothing to both confirm the rising social and capitalist power of the female figure in the eighteenth-century marketplace, and reduce this rising female to the subjectivity of her clothing in order to situate her under patriarchal economical control, respectively. Keep Reading

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Black Feminist Discourse of Power in For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide

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Lamia Khalil Hammad, Yarmouk University, Jordan

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A Science Fiction in a Gothic Scaffold: a Reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

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Zinia Mitra, Nakshalbari College, Darjeeling, India

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Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus is a unique blend of two genres: Gothic and science fiction. While it follows the gothic convention of tale within tales, its epistolary framework and keeps intact its unrestrained lengthy articulations, it explores at the same time the innovative marvels of modern science. The fire that Prometheus stole form Zeus to help mankind is ingeniously   replaced in the novel by the spark of electricity. The novel also puts to question some traditional social assumptions. Keep Reading

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Carolina Ferrer, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada

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In March 1992, researchers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean inaugurated in Paris the conference Épistémocritique et Cognition, thus giving official birth to epistemocriticism. This new branch of literary criticism incites us to make a re-appropriation of culture as a whole. Essentially, this perspective calls on us to explore the relations between literature and science. The purpose of my paper is to extend epistemocriticism to film studies. Thus, I analyse how bifurcation theory and Borges’s story “The Garden of Forking Paths” operate as main interdiscoursive artefacts in Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes and in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky. Accordingly, I believe that extending this perspective to film studies, we can achieve a better understanding of what happens in these forking-paths films. Keep Reading

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In Search of… a Third Culture: Towards an Experimental Science and Nature Cinema

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 Walter C. Metz, Southern Illinois University

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Dark Side of the Moon: Dickens and the Supernatural

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Quite overshadowed by Dickens the social reformer and Victorian England’s most popular and prolific author, lay Dickens a man fascinated with the occult and the supernatural, a practitioner of mesmerism, a believer in the pseudo-science of phrenology, a man so obsessed with the Gothic that time and again he registered a covert, symbolic re-emergence of it throughout his works. Dickens harboured a lifelong attraction towards the supernatural, evidenced in his childhood fondness for the weekly magazine The Terrific Register, dealing with themes of ghosts, murder, incest and cannibalism, and in the several ghost-stories interspersed throughout the corpus of his work. Deeply involved in the 19th Century debates over the existence of spirits and the veracity of ghost sightings, Dickens oscillated between faith in the existence of the other-worldly and scepticism. Always concerned with the psychological aspect of the supernatural, Dickens’ work shows a constant engagement with the eerie, the uncanny and the grotesque. This paper attempts to explore not only the evolution of the theme of the supernatural in Dickens’ works but also his changing attitudes towards it. Keep Reading

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The Reconstruction of Identity of the Gentleman in Great Expectations

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Madhumita Majumdar, Bhangar Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata

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      When people say that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, what they mean is …that Dickens could not describe a gentleman as gentlemen feel a gentleman. They mean that he could not take that atmosphere easily, accept it as normal atmosphere, or describes that world from the inside….Dickens did not describe gentleman in the way that gentlemen describe gentlemen…He described them…from the outside, as he described any other oddity or special trade.

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Exploring Dickens through a Director’s Lens: a Study of the Cinematic Presentation of A Tale of Two Cities

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