Category — Film Theory

The chaste Tamil word Ayan is made to suspend its real aura3 and enact a performative and false aura for the sake of lending a unique flavour to a film which is not unique and which is of a run-of-the mill kind. The word Ayan has its aura fixed in the realism of the Sangam age. Not long ago, Zizek remarked that the “the fetish is the embodiment of a lie that enables us to endure an unbearable truth.4 Invoking the Zizekian notion of fetish, one can come closer to the post-colonial problematic of Ayan as the title of a masala Tamil film. The film Ayan has its unrealistic grandeur as the real (the truth) and claims to be realistic in terms of the title and plot as the fetish (the lie). [Read more →]

Ayan is the name of a popular Tamil film doing the rounds in theatres in India and abroad (one Tamil diasporic site talks proudly that Ayan is the first Tamil film to have its posters inside an American railway station)1. It is starred by Surya, one of the current star favourites, as Ayan. Ayan (rhymes as Iron in English) opens up immense possibilities to serve as a fit case to apply a host of theoretical perspectives to Tamil cinema as a site of post-colonial markers. [Read more →]

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image is the first international scholarly journal devoted to the study of the interaction between music and sound with the entirety of moving image media – film, television, music video, advertising, computer games, mixed-media installation, digital art, live cinema, et alia. [Read more →]

"Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi" brings cheer to exhibitors after six months.

According to the widely-circulated Indian business newspaper Economic Times, the Shah Rukh Khan starrer Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (Dir: Aditya Chopra) has bailed out the Indian exhibition sector. The last film to have given the sector cheer was the August release of Singh is Kinng (Dir: Anees Bazmee). It is impossible to obtain accurate and reliable data on the Indian exhibition sector, but if we go by reports in the business and economic newspapers we get the picture that all is not well with the industry. Discussions about Hindi cinema post-90s is filled with the buzz word — corporatisation. Let us call it modernisation, given the history of discourse about its “backward” or “not-yet” nature. The Economic Times reports sums up the problem of modernisation well: [Read more →]

The notions of benevolence and benevolent subjectivity have been serving as important theoretical constructs in relating to the conditions of subalterneity in diverse cultural contexts. Gayatri Spivak‘s theoretical addresses concerning the above have elevated the purportedly centuries-old feudal marker of benevolence into a post colonial marker par excellence. This seems not only a theoretically sound mode of [Read more →]

What Indian film consumers want

Screeen, a film weekly has conducted a survey on Indian film audience to learn more about their preferences and views. Find it here.

A father, daughter, and son star in their own Star Wars. Great tribute. Enjoy!

Guardian reports the launch of Fox Star Studios, a Fox Studios venture into Indian cinema (read here). I had predicted changes in structures of ownership (read here), written about the formal subsumption of capital (read here). Majors such as Sony Pictures had already shown the way to do it in Bollywood (read here). [Read more →]

Well… as William Leith of The Guardian asks (and answers) rhetorically, Izgnanie (The Banishment) is the most Russian film ever made. Leith explains it as what it is not — a Hollywood film. Thus, lack of familiarity defines what Russian cinema is. [Read more →]

Image Metrics, a California-based animation company has come up with a modelling technology that allows a face to be recognised in its minutest detail and converted to animation.  The technology, unlike earlier motion, capture works “without markers, make-up, specialised stages, or sets“. The results are stunning. For example, watch Emily: [Read more →]