Fwd: Re: Archive (13) Jenson Joseph: Impostors, Anti-Heroes and Desecrated Bodies
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JJ: First of all let me thank Shaina, Ashok, Ashish for inviting me to be part of the discussions and the excitement here. And a big thanks to Zinnia for helping me with uploading and caching the films on the archive. I want take more than 10 minutes, I promise.
JJ: And, continuing from where Satish and Shafeeq left, my attempt here will be to try to talk simultaneously about the digital aesthetics of the computer era and the bodies that inhabit contemporary Malayalam cinema, seeking to establish certain parallel threads between these two domains.
JJ: Let me get straight into the first thing. Digital aesthetics of the computer era, by inviting your attention to what new media scholar Lev Manovich identifies as the waning of mantage in cinema and the evocative discussion that Alexander Galloway constructs around it.
JJ: (?) to the waning importance of montage in cinematic aesthetics over the last few decades Manovich says 'It is hard to understate the importance of montage as a twentieth-century cinematic technique. It extends from Lev Kuleshov and Dziga Vertov to the very centre of classic Hollywood continuity method. Montage is as central to the moving image as sound or light. In fact the neglect of montage in the period after the second World War is often a touchstone for a rejection of hegemonic form in screen media, as in the long takes of (Roberto) Rossellini, (Frederick) Wiseman, Jim Jarmusch, (Jean-Luc) Godard, or a number of other directors explicitly working outside of the classical Hollywood model, whereas in earlier times, as with (Sergei) Eisenstein, heightened montage was one of the key ingredients for progressive film form. With the advent of the new media of the late twentieth century it is possible to identify a waning in the importance and use of montage as a formal technique, except that today it is not an indicator of any experimental tendency.'
JJ: Using Manovich's observation Galloway identifies the logic of windowing whereby more than one image appears framed with the entire screen as replacing that of montage in today's cinema. So... he identifies the logic of windowing as replacing that of montage in today's cinema, arguing that undoing chronological montage is one way in which the computer goes beyond cinema. He says, 'This is one of the great aesthetic leaps of the graphical user interface beyond the examples set by cinema: No longer will the viewer experience montage via cuts over time proceeding from shot to shot. One must now cut within any given frame holding two or more source images side by side which themselves will persist montage-free over much longer takes than their cinematic predecessors. This phenomena is evident in the windowed personal computer interface, but also in the gaming interface which "windows" using inset, distinct image sources such as the heads-up-display. Fusing cuts within the frame replaces fusing cuts in time.'
JJ: Galloway notes that this post-montage digital aesthetic is in fact a resorting back to the pre-cinematic polyptych stylistics. Tentatively put, there are 2 ways in which this windowing logic manifests in archives like indiancine.ma, pad.ma, bak.ma etc. These are for example... Gallery page of pad.ma or indiancine.ma in which we see listing of various videos and films in conversation often, intimately perhaps, but nondialectically. And the other form is the Film Studies' use of indiancine.ma archive by tagging a number of scenes like the chain of clips made of telephone sequences across hindi films, is another manifestation of this windowing logic.
JJ: And I'm going to connect that to contemporary Malayalam cinema aesthetics. Film journalists and critics in the region have started calling a set of films made after the 2000's with the curious endearing tag 'New Generation Cinema'. And one of the new stylistic (?) deployed across a range of contemporary Malayalam films is that of the polyptych. I had visuals in a ppt but the ppt is not loading here.
JJ: But you could google polyptych and see... it is p-o-l-y-p-t-y-c-h. If anyone is interested. The polyptych stylistic we could argue is in many ways indicative of the antidialectical term that the contemporary social structure has taken with the logics of decentralised networks and protocols of control replacing those of the centralised institutions that characterised disciplinary societies.
JJ: Now can we transpose the polyptych stylistics symptomatic of the antidialectical turn and the post-disciplinary society logics of the contemporary to patterns of bodily representation? What I have done with the indiancine.ma archive is to tag a few sequences of intense bodily engagement from 3 landmark Malayali films of the post 2000's beginning with the 2001 film Head or Tails (
Chappa Kurishu) directed by Sameer Thahir, and moving to 2 very recent films - Mahesh's Revenge (
Maheshinte Prathikaaram) in 2016 and Evidence & Witness (
Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum) in 2017, both directed by Dileesh Pothan.
Jenson's clip selection in an Edit:
https://indiancine.ma/edits/jenson_joseph:Bodies_in_New_Gen_Malayalam/annotations/index
JJ: In these clips we see a recurring pattern of narrative resolutions ending in tussles at the end of which what emerges is not a victorious figure or a clear winner, but a strange intimacy with the enemy and ones own body. So let's watch these sequences.
JJ: ... Basically these are all stories of fights between 2 male protagonists ending in this tussle, but there's no clear winner emerging or there's no victorious figure emerging, but some sort of a strange intimacy as well as self-desecrating processes... and which happens as some sort of... a ritualised thing.
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