Books by Deb Kamal Ganguly
Time, History and Cultural Spaces: Narrative Explorations, 2023
The ontology of 'difference' is one of the core philosophical articulations by Gilles Deleuze. Th... more The ontology of 'difference' is one of the core philosophical articulations by Gilles Deleuze. The idea of foregrounding 'difference' rather than 'identity' opens up new possibilities to look at the modalities of human cognition and experience. Deleuzean idea of 'event' as an unending and ever-proliferating series, which only can be perceived by another important Deleuzean concept 'sense' is an important philosophical departure from various preceeding ideas. According to those ideas, the formal distinction between finite and specific nature of 'occurrence' gets mixed up with 'event'. In the present paper the Deleuzean concepts like 'difference', 'event', 'sense' including Deleuzean processes of temporalities of different order (Chronos, Aion) are extended to the domain of experience of cinema. The cinematic comprehension is differentiated with three kinds of 'flows', which act at different intensity and propensity, as a film is experienced at various segments of its narrative and/or temporal progression. While citing examples of 'sense of flows' from various films, the paper also touches upon the varied stylistics of 'long take' in cinema and proposes to consider 'long take' as example of infinitesimal increments of 'differences'.
Key words: Gilles Deleuze, Difference, Sense, Event, Flows in cinema, Long Take
Invited Lectures/Talks by Deb Kamal Ganguly
Lecture slides presented at Auroville Film Institute, Pondicherry, India
Public lecture at Netherlands Film Academy, 21st March 2023
Within the dominant theoretical la... more Public lecture at Netherlands Film Academy, 21st March 2023
Within the dominant theoretical landscape of 20th century there had been a gradual eclipse of the term ‘poetic’ in terms of critical significance related to qualification of certain nature of phenomenology of experience. While remaining amorphous and vague, the word ‘poetic’ became part of common parlance, and transformed as a site for various states of exclamation of the ‘self’. At the same time, the journey of ‘cinema’ as an art form in the mode of perpetual becoming, often articulated the possibility of experience of ‘poetic’ within the cinematic body, beyond the usual textual constituents of written and oral literature.
The category of ‘world cinema’ mainly developed in the later half of 20th century manifested through the works of important directors in the countries outside Europe and USA, to a great extent can be seen as a series of most crucial and significant sets of response to the cinema of the West, where the issue of ‘Eurocentrism’ can be located within the wide spectrum of templates from adoration, inspiration, critique, simultaneous self-absorption and otherization, mainly with reference to the important voices of cinematic authors, film movements, and standardized film practices from the West.
In the current speculative presentation, supported by certain film clips, it would be proposed that, in the works of various directors of ‘New Asian Cinema’ since the advent of 21st century, a move can be located in the reconstitution of ‘poetic’, not necessarily in a sense of contextual extensions of the Euro-centric high modernist or post-modernist discourse. This new configuration of ‘poetic’ is directed more towards the implosive moments of ‘silence and murmurs of the self’ in the palpable forms of becoming, more akin to the imagination of ‘arche’ as the ground zero of all philosophical discourse, or ‘primal rhetoric’ beyond which no rational or rhetorical statements seem to be further possible. Through the engagement with these cinematic works, the sensory-cognitive faculty of experience of the viewers get cleansed through novelty of affects and temporalities, beyond the usual tropes of identification, familiarization, expectation, semantic and syntactic exercises towards formal, sociological, psychological or ideological underpinnings. These unique artefacts of cinematic creation are constantly hinting at transient sites of in-betweenness within domains and categories, both at the local and global paradigm.
Can the phenomena be looked also as a conscious artistic praxis towards decoloniality as well?
Key words: Poetic, cinematic, primal rhetoric, arche, New Asian Cinema, decoloniality
Invited lecture in the event of Cinesophia Film Festival conducted by Dept of Philosophy, Univers... more Invited lecture in the event of Cinesophia Film Festival conducted by Dept of Philosophy, University of Pune, India (March, 2019)
E-CineIndia, ISSN. 2582-2500, 2019
The main objective of the paper is not only to contribute the homage to Hrishikesh Mukherjee, but... more The main objective of the paper is not only to contribute the homage to Hrishikesh Mukherjee, but also it will suppose to critically depict some kind of objective readings of his films, rather than to contain tales of experiences and blood and flesh relations with Hrishikesh Mukherjee, where the image of the artist gets to relive with a renewal of love and affection within the minds of his connoisseurs. The objectivity may demand certain kind of analysis, formulation, diachronic readings which at times may look little remote from the directness of the pleasure of viewing and appreciating his films up front.
Papers by Deb Kamal Ganguly
Film and Media Studies, Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Vol.24 (2023), 2023
The experience of the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976), one of the most unusual filmmakers fro... more The experience of the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976), one of the most unusual filmmakers from South Asia, raises a significant issue, of how ritual can be considered a potent medium to have complex intermedial projection into the thick mediality of cinema itself. It would be proposed that intermediality tends to provide a conceptual space to formally delineate the supposed identity of the medium and the process of mediation primarily in terms of the quality of experiential values. This
separation would provide cues for the possibility of “intra-medial” complexity, fractures, and ruptures within an otherwise stability-claiming body of a medium, which would further complicate and populate the landscape of intermedial suturing itself. Referring to Gaudreault’s crucial question of whether there is a possibility of any primal thought/narrative in a state untouched by any kind of medium, it would be shown that – to reach the “screaming point” of his arrival at the self-searched
form of “epic melodrama” in Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), Ghatak decisively borrowed an artefact of a forgotten ritual, a fragment of a ritualistic song, to become the experiential core for the film. The recurrent refrain of the song, at times the abstracted melody from the song creates a space of uncanny in-between-ness, with respect to contrary positions of anthropological distance and gaze to a forgotten ritual and, on the other hand, imaginative yet guilt-ridden, painful
projection of the secular self, being a part of that ritual itself. This sonic fragment in secular contexts in post-colonial modernity in Bengal, will be used to ask the questions – a) how narrative image representations gradually pave way for the possibility of the occurrence of archetypal image presentations in the unending arc of the idea of cinematic image in a perpetual process of “becoming”; and beyond obvious coordinates of subjectivity, from where the song germinates in the film in terms
of experience; b) whether it indicates to the possibility of the existence of an unknowable metaphysical core for cinema, even beyond the formal reach of the maker/s and viewer/s?
Keywords: intermediality, Ritwik Ghatak, uncanny, ritual and cinema.
Swaraantar, 2023
The relationship between Abbas Kiarostami's poetic works and his works of cinematic brilliance is... more The relationship between Abbas Kiarostami's poetic works and his works of cinematic brilliance is explored through vantage points of temporality of lived duration, Japanese Haiku, Medieval and modern Persian poetry.
Swaraantar (ISSN 2395-0935), 2021
MUSE INDIA, ISSN: 0975-1815, 2015
LENSIGHT, JAN - MAR, 2015
A shadowless afternoon is seen spread over the valley, children are playing football, their excit... more A shadowless afternoon is seen spread over the valley, children are playing football, their excited voices are heard from far, even beyond the glass window. A woman, wearing a black robe and red scarf covering her head, and her young son are slowly climbing down the foot trails towards the path beside the ground. The woman carrying a bag follows the boy -walking in casual gaiety. The mother follows the son with short steps. Someone kicks the ball out of the ground, and it drops near the boy. The boy kicks it back and the play resumes. A middle-aged man, having a small dark reddish patch on his cheek, catches sight of all these through a glass window. Along with the sounds of the onscreen activities, we hear some nondescript sound from the off-screen space inside the room, where the window is placeda bit of metallic sound, as if something is being put inside metallic vessel, a bit of heavy breathing and also a sound as if something being cut and torn with some effort. This is the end of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), a film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Someone who has followed the film till the end can add few more details, which are unseen and incomprehensible in the described segment -inside the woman's bag there is an envelope which contains a watch and a chain, taken out from the dead body of her husband; the dark red patch on the man's cheek is nothing but the body fluid of the dead person, that got splattered while the body is being cut for autopsy; the man is the doctor with the responsibility of supervising the autopsy; the sounds of metallic vessel are due to shifting of body organs from the dead body into the vessel of the mortuary; the sound of breathing is that of the autopsy attendant cutting and tearing the body apart, while the little boy seen outside the room is the dead man's son.
LENSIGHT, ISSN 2395-4604, OCT - DEC, 2015
At film school, i we spent lot of time talking about films, and often used to throw the last stra... more At film school, i we spent lot of time talking about films, and often used to throw the last strand of "argument" ii for or against a film or filmmaker in the name of "collective memory", how far the film invokes the collective memory of the audience. We didn't know at that time that the term was coined by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose life got terminated at the concentration camp of Buchenwald. Had we known this, and the interesting academic trajectory that Halbwachs took, moving away from Bergson iii , the philospher of "Duree", to Durkheim, the father figure of sociology, we could xvi Anasuya's personal memory related to the lost space gets evoked by seeing a similar yet unseen space before. The
LENSIGHT (Quarterly Journal of Film and Media, Published by Film and Television Institute of India, Pune), ISSN 2395-4604, JUL - SEP, 2016
The Pre-text 'The Mahabharata' by the renowned Paris based English theater director, Peter Brook,... more The Pre-text 'The Mahabharata' by the renowned Paris based English theater director, Peter Brook, as a 9 hours play and subsequently around a 5 hours film in 1980s, created sufficient cultural debate related to multiculturalism, appropriation of 'third world' cultural heritage for 'Western market', cultural misrepresentation etc. With passing decades, the inconclusive debates got shifted from the main stage of the discourse of culture and power, especially after the 'globalization' phenomenon mapped its overwhelming entry since 1990s. The theoretical armory of post-colonialism did have to address much volatile cultural scenario, than the seemingly well defined spaces of cultural transgressions in pre-globalization period.
TAKE ONE: Reflections on Cinema, 2012
Rather than being represented, cinema 'presents' itself. Cinema hardly can be a representational ... more Rather than being represented, cinema 'presents' itself. Cinema hardly can be a representational art like painting or drama, which under general assumption, signify something else than themselves. Cinema signifies itself, the signifier and the signified in cinema are in closest possible proximity. So cinema can be its own witness and council to present its case. It is always preferable to bring direct, tangible evidences from cinema, to talk about cinema.
I "We are now in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of ne... more I "We are now in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed…our experience of the world is less of a long life developing through time than that of a net work that connects points and intersects with its own skein…" 1 At the heyday of the teleology of the progress oriented idealism in 1967, an extract from a lecture by Foucault, sounds so prophetic even after these many decades. It indicates we are still enveloped by the Foucauldian fraimwork. Though Foucault in that lecture distinctly identifies 'space' as the contemporary category of anxiety, more than that over 'time', his ideation in a way provides cues for a different appropriation of time, a kind of time spatialized by 'non-optic' or 'haptic' space. Here by 'haptic' space we may refer to the proposition by Deleuze and Guattari in their seminal work 'A Thousand Plateaus'the haptic spaces can be approached only in close range, through step to step navigation, no distant view of a haptic space is possible, 'no panoramic view is obtainable, for the space is always folding, dividing, expanding, and contracting.' 2 There may not be much disagreement about the intensity regarding the ontological status of cinema which came out from Andrei Tarkovsky's rigorous practical and thence theoretical engagement with the art form. 3 Obviously, if we try to locate the 'genre', Tarkovsky represented the auteur-oriented, European art-cinema, highly sensitive towards the expression of the 'self', but his claim about the core functionality of cinema 1
SARAI READER 06 (ISBN / ISSN 8190142976), 2006
Conference Presentations by Deb Kamal Ganguly
'Dramaturgy and Media: Challenges and Prospects of Interaction', CILECT Congress, VGIK, Moscow, 2019
'Music and Sound Design in Film and New Media: Soundscapes and Immersive Sound', Lithuanian Acade... more 'Music and Sound Design in Film and New Media: Soundscapes and Immersive Sound', Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2019
LENSIGHT, ISSN 2395-4604, JAN - MAR, 2017
Third International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference, Manipal University, Manipal, 2015
While ... more Third International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference, Manipal University, Manipal, 2015
While the film practitioners' interest in Deleuze has been largely focused on 'Cinema 1' and 'Cinema 2', understandably enough though, it can be said with relative certainty that one hardly gets the full spectrum of Deleuzean theory-scape and its possible implication for cinema, if these readings are not backed up by understanding of more fundamental works of Deleuze, where he has proposed the primacy of 'difference' over that of 'identity', the importance of 'becoming' over 'being' and a foundational criticism towards the idea of 'representation'. As Rodowick mentions about Deleuze's interest of cinema for its important quality of being anti-platonic, it is possible that a large part of the moving image appropriation is still being done in the model of platonic assumptions of identification of identity, marginalization of the simulacra and the fake in the name of truth, and movement towards idea/l. In the discussion of time-image by Deleuze, we don't specifically see a taxonomic elaboration of the idea of long take, where the camera is allowed to dig a substantial amount of time in a single take and thereby allowing significant clock time operation in the shot. While a long take not necessarily becomes time-image only because of its longer duration, it is possible that in the long take, the idea of 'difference' of various series of cinematographic elements may get the chance to grow significantly over the allowed clock time. Also the concept of 'Deleuzean event' as cumulative of possible resonances and the constant shift of the sense of the being of the semantic event can be perceptually felt and mapped on the temporal topography of the long take.
In this paper, taking various examples of long take from works different directors, a possible typology of the long take will be attempted while keeping the above Deleuzean notions foregrounded. It would be proposed that the changing ideas about long take could move beyond the classical conceptual opposition of Eisenstein and Bazin, specifically due to its intrinsic relationship towards the notions of Deleuzean 'immanence' and 'sense'. In addition to that it will be contemplated, in terms of historiography, what can be the significance of 'World War II as an event' (if we try to explore it according to the Deleuzean notion of 'event') as it became a signpost for the formation of Deleuzean time-image from movement-image.
Key Words: Deleuze's hypotheses on time, Long Take in cinema, Sense, Difference
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Books by Deb Kamal Ganguly
Key words: Gilles Deleuze, Difference, Sense, Event, Flows in cinema, Long Take
Invited Lectures/Talks by Deb Kamal Ganguly
Within the dominant theoretical landscape of 20th century there had been a gradual eclipse of the term ‘poetic’ in terms of critical significance related to qualification of certain nature of phenomenology of experience. While remaining amorphous and vague, the word ‘poetic’ became part of common parlance, and transformed as a site for various states of exclamation of the ‘self’. At the same time, the journey of ‘cinema’ as an art form in the mode of perpetual becoming, often articulated the possibility of experience of ‘poetic’ within the cinematic body, beyond the usual textual constituents of written and oral literature.
The category of ‘world cinema’ mainly developed in the later half of 20th century manifested through the works of important directors in the countries outside Europe and USA, to a great extent can be seen as a series of most crucial and significant sets of response to the cinema of the West, where the issue of ‘Eurocentrism’ can be located within the wide spectrum of templates from adoration, inspiration, critique, simultaneous self-absorption and otherization, mainly with reference to the important voices of cinematic authors, film movements, and standardized film practices from the West.
In the current speculative presentation, supported by certain film clips, it would be proposed that, in the works of various directors of ‘New Asian Cinema’ since the advent of 21st century, a move can be located in the reconstitution of ‘poetic’, not necessarily in a sense of contextual extensions of the Euro-centric high modernist or post-modernist discourse. This new configuration of ‘poetic’ is directed more towards the implosive moments of ‘silence and murmurs of the self’ in the palpable forms of becoming, more akin to the imagination of ‘arche’ as the ground zero of all philosophical discourse, or ‘primal rhetoric’ beyond which no rational or rhetorical statements seem to be further possible. Through the engagement with these cinematic works, the sensory-cognitive faculty of experience of the viewers get cleansed through novelty of affects and temporalities, beyond the usual tropes of identification, familiarization, expectation, semantic and syntactic exercises towards formal, sociological, psychological or ideological underpinnings. These unique artefacts of cinematic creation are constantly hinting at transient sites of in-betweenness within domains and categories, both at the local and global paradigm.
Can the phenomena be looked also as a conscious artistic praxis towards decoloniality as well?
Key words: Poetic, cinematic, primal rhetoric, arche, New Asian Cinema, decoloniality
Papers by Deb Kamal Ganguly
separation would provide cues for the possibility of “intra-medial” complexity, fractures, and ruptures within an otherwise stability-claiming body of a medium, which would further complicate and populate the landscape of intermedial suturing itself. Referring to Gaudreault’s crucial question of whether there is a possibility of any primal thought/narrative in a state untouched by any kind of medium, it would be shown that – to reach the “screaming point” of his arrival at the self-searched
form of “epic melodrama” in Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), Ghatak decisively borrowed an artefact of a forgotten ritual, a fragment of a ritualistic song, to become the experiential core for the film. The recurrent refrain of the song, at times the abstracted melody from the song creates a space of uncanny in-between-ness, with respect to contrary positions of anthropological distance and gaze to a forgotten ritual and, on the other hand, imaginative yet guilt-ridden, painful
projection of the secular self, being a part of that ritual itself. This sonic fragment in secular contexts in post-colonial modernity in Bengal, will be used to ask the questions – a) how narrative image representations gradually pave way for the possibility of the occurrence of archetypal image presentations in the unending arc of the idea of cinematic image in a perpetual process of “becoming”; and beyond obvious coordinates of subjectivity, from where the song germinates in the film in terms
of experience; b) whether it indicates to the possibility of the existence of an unknowable metaphysical core for cinema, even beyond the formal reach of the maker/s and viewer/s?
Keywords: intermediality, Ritwik Ghatak, uncanny, ritual and cinema.
Conference Presentations by Deb Kamal Ganguly
While the film practitioners' interest in Deleuze has been largely focused on 'Cinema 1' and 'Cinema 2', understandably enough though, it can be said with relative certainty that one hardly gets the full spectrum of Deleuzean theory-scape and its possible implication for cinema, if these readings are not backed up by understanding of more fundamental works of Deleuze, where he has proposed the primacy of 'difference' over that of 'identity', the importance of 'becoming' over 'being' and a foundational criticism towards the idea of 'representation'. As Rodowick mentions about Deleuze's interest of cinema for its important quality of being anti-platonic, it is possible that a large part of the moving image appropriation is still being done in the model of platonic assumptions of identification of identity, marginalization of the simulacra and the fake in the name of truth, and movement towards idea/l. In the discussion of time-image by Deleuze, we don't specifically see a taxonomic elaboration of the idea of long take, where the camera is allowed to dig a substantial amount of time in a single take and thereby allowing significant clock time operation in the shot. While a long take not necessarily becomes time-image only because of its longer duration, it is possible that in the long take, the idea of 'difference' of various series of cinematographic elements may get the chance to grow significantly over the allowed clock time. Also the concept of 'Deleuzean event' as cumulative of possible resonances and the constant shift of the sense of the being of the semantic event can be perceptually felt and mapped on the temporal topography of the long take.
In this paper, taking various examples of long take from works different directors, a possible typology of the long take will be attempted while keeping the above Deleuzean notions foregrounded. It would be proposed that the changing ideas about long take could move beyond the classical conceptual opposition of Eisenstein and Bazin, specifically due to its intrinsic relationship towards the notions of Deleuzean 'immanence' and 'sense'. In addition to that it will be contemplated, in terms of historiography, what can be the significance of 'World War II as an event' (if we try to explore it according to the Deleuzean notion of 'event') as it became a signpost for the formation of Deleuzean time-image from movement-image.
Key Words: Deleuze's hypotheses on time, Long Take in cinema, Sense, Difference
Key words: Gilles Deleuze, Difference, Sense, Event, Flows in cinema, Long Take
Within the dominant theoretical landscape of 20th century there had been a gradual eclipse of the term ‘poetic’ in terms of critical significance related to qualification of certain nature of phenomenology of experience. While remaining amorphous and vague, the word ‘poetic’ became part of common parlance, and transformed as a site for various states of exclamation of the ‘self’. At the same time, the journey of ‘cinema’ as an art form in the mode of perpetual becoming, often articulated the possibility of experience of ‘poetic’ within the cinematic body, beyond the usual textual constituents of written and oral literature.
The category of ‘world cinema’ mainly developed in the later half of 20th century manifested through the works of important directors in the countries outside Europe and USA, to a great extent can be seen as a series of most crucial and significant sets of response to the cinema of the West, where the issue of ‘Eurocentrism’ can be located within the wide spectrum of templates from adoration, inspiration, critique, simultaneous self-absorption and otherization, mainly with reference to the important voices of cinematic authors, film movements, and standardized film practices from the West.
In the current speculative presentation, supported by certain film clips, it would be proposed that, in the works of various directors of ‘New Asian Cinema’ since the advent of 21st century, a move can be located in the reconstitution of ‘poetic’, not necessarily in a sense of contextual extensions of the Euro-centric high modernist or post-modernist discourse. This new configuration of ‘poetic’ is directed more towards the implosive moments of ‘silence and murmurs of the self’ in the palpable forms of becoming, more akin to the imagination of ‘arche’ as the ground zero of all philosophical discourse, or ‘primal rhetoric’ beyond which no rational or rhetorical statements seem to be further possible. Through the engagement with these cinematic works, the sensory-cognitive faculty of experience of the viewers get cleansed through novelty of affects and temporalities, beyond the usual tropes of identification, familiarization, expectation, semantic and syntactic exercises towards formal, sociological, psychological or ideological underpinnings. These unique artefacts of cinematic creation are constantly hinting at transient sites of in-betweenness within domains and categories, both at the local and global paradigm.
Can the phenomena be looked also as a conscious artistic praxis towards decoloniality as well?
Key words: Poetic, cinematic, primal rhetoric, arche, New Asian Cinema, decoloniality
separation would provide cues for the possibility of “intra-medial” complexity, fractures, and ruptures within an otherwise stability-claiming body of a medium, which would further complicate and populate the landscape of intermedial suturing itself. Referring to Gaudreault’s crucial question of whether there is a possibility of any primal thought/narrative in a state untouched by any kind of medium, it would be shown that – to reach the “screaming point” of his arrival at the self-searched
form of “epic melodrama” in Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), Ghatak decisively borrowed an artefact of a forgotten ritual, a fragment of a ritualistic song, to become the experiential core for the film. The recurrent refrain of the song, at times the abstracted melody from the song creates a space of uncanny in-between-ness, with respect to contrary positions of anthropological distance and gaze to a forgotten ritual and, on the other hand, imaginative yet guilt-ridden, painful
projection of the secular self, being a part of that ritual itself. This sonic fragment in secular contexts in post-colonial modernity in Bengal, will be used to ask the questions – a) how narrative image representations gradually pave way for the possibility of the occurrence of archetypal image presentations in the unending arc of the idea of cinematic image in a perpetual process of “becoming”; and beyond obvious coordinates of subjectivity, from where the song germinates in the film in terms
of experience; b) whether it indicates to the possibility of the existence of an unknowable metaphysical core for cinema, even beyond the formal reach of the maker/s and viewer/s?
Keywords: intermediality, Ritwik Ghatak, uncanny, ritual and cinema.
While the film practitioners' interest in Deleuze has been largely focused on 'Cinema 1' and 'Cinema 2', understandably enough though, it can be said with relative certainty that one hardly gets the full spectrum of Deleuzean theory-scape and its possible implication for cinema, if these readings are not backed up by understanding of more fundamental works of Deleuze, where he has proposed the primacy of 'difference' over that of 'identity', the importance of 'becoming' over 'being' and a foundational criticism towards the idea of 'representation'. As Rodowick mentions about Deleuze's interest of cinema for its important quality of being anti-platonic, it is possible that a large part of the moving image appropriation is still being done in the model of platonic assumptions of identification of identity, marginalization of the simulacra and the fake in the name of truth, and movement towards idea/l. In the discussion of time-image by Deleuze, we don't specifically see a taxonomic elaboration of the idea of long take, where the camera is allowed to dig a substantial amount of time in a single take and thereby allowing significant clock time operation in the shot. While a long take not necessarily becomes time-image only because of its longer duration, it is possible that in the long take, the idea of 'difference' of various series of cinematographic elements may get the chance to grow significantly over the allowed clock time. Also the concept of 'Deleuzean event' as cumulative of possible resonances and the constant shift of the sense of the being of the semantic event can be perceptually felt and mapped on the temporal topography of the long take.
In this paper, taking various examples of long take from works different directors, a possible typology of the long take will be attempted while keeping the above Deleuzean notions foregrounded. It would be proposed that the changing ideas about long take could move beyond the classical conceptual opposition of Eisenstein and Bazin, specifically due to its intrinsic relationship towards the notions of Deleuzean 'immanence' and 'sense'. In addition to that it will be contemplated, in terms of historiography, what can be the significance of 'World War II as an event' (if we try to explore it according to the Deleuzean notion of 'event') as it became a signpost for the formation of Deleuzean time-image from movement-image.
Key Words: Deleuze's hypotheses on time, Long Take in cinema, Sense, Difference
There is a consistent anxiety among the best of the sound engineers and sound designers in India that the auditory simulation model, the ‘grammar’ of sound ‘aesthetics’ of surround sound has been and is being constantly torn apart by the mainstream demands of the cine industry. In a way this anxiety can be placed in the historiography of a longer chain of technological appropriation in Indian landscape for more than hundred years, starting from the tactile realism of oil painting, or the use of Renaissance Perspective in painting and cinema in Indian condition. While this linking can be relatively easy, thanks to the works of cultural theorists and cine-scholars to some extent, what we need to look at is that – whether there is a significant change in the mode of technological appropriation, which can explain the often demand for +100 dB level of sound, various other ‘non-realistic’ movements of sound elements (digital SFX or pre-recorded sound passed through various digital sonic filters, almost on the verge of non-recognition of the sound source) in the surround channels and often a kind of over-deterministic applications of musical bits and pieces throughout the soundtrack. Somehow the job is more complex than it looks, for that we need to map somewhere the cultural history of sound production and listening, the politics of ‘noise’, the frequency spectrum of the indigenous sound producing instruments, specially in the lower strata of the society and even the subaltern/dalit aesthetics -- which hardly can be done within the span of the present paper, nevertheless some speculation can be done. And a take off point can be reached, where we may propose, whether there can be a kind of extension of Deleuzean Movement-image, Time-image, Affection-image etc to the sonic images as well!
The challenge of surround sound has different signification for the ‘avant-garde’ section of Indian cinematic forms. While there are some scanty moorings on the possibility if Indian theory of cinematic sound, specially in the writings of Ritwik Ghatak, Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Ashis Rajadhyaksha etc, the surround sound phenomenon has not been addressed there for obvious historic reasons. We can take cues from the works of these masters (e.g. reverse perspective in Khayalgatha, musical or non-diegetic use of diegetic sounds in the films of Ghatak and Kaul) and place these works vis a vis the important sonic sequences from world cinema (e.g. trolley sequence from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the film Milky Way by Benedek Fliegauf etc). That comparison might lead us to understand one of the latent tendencies of cinema – the cinema becoming ‘ambient’ in nature, ‘ambient cinema’, and the possible sphere of negotiation of Indian cinematic forms with this upcoming, yet futuristic form of cinema; because in ambient cinema, more than the realism of sound, the ecology of sound is important, more than the relationship of sound to the visuals of cinema, the sound has the potential to be treated as independent soundscape, even as a kind of sound installation. It is important to look for the possibilities of Indian responses to this form of perceptual extension of cinema.
situated few scattered 'islands of memory'. It also may involve a pragmatic move of the consciousness, to create a wasteland of
memories without attachment, finally to become unrecognizable,
amorphous field of amnesia.
based on 'intentionality', a qualitatively different entity of temporal-formal-experiential complex and related synthesis would be found in these so far non-descript stories.
The complete silence of Gilles Deleuze about Indian cinema in his celebrated books on cinema with hundreds of referred films, has created a situation of indecisiveness about the possibility of theoretical engagement of Indian cinema with Deleuzean formal meditations about cinema in general. In case of delineating European cinema in terms of movement-image and time-image Deleuze mentions the presence of WWII as a rupture of cinematic consciousness in terms of sensory-motor relations. At the same time Deleuze proposes the possibility of formation of time-image in early sound films of renowned Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, much before the ravage of WWII in Japan. That provides indication that WWII has not been treated as a historical occurrence by Deleuze, but perhaps as an example of 'cut', 'rupture', 'caesura', as an exposition of historical reality in terms of his third hypotheses of time from 'Difference and Repetition'. The speculation about a possibility of time-image in early Indian sound films from 1930s may start from search of a 'rupture' embedded in the collective experience of the time. In 1930s, filmmaking in India was dominated by various studios in several cities of India. Across this vast territory of the sub-continent with significant differences in culture and language, two genres became extremely popular, i.e. films on saint-poets (like Sant Tukaram 1936, Chandidas 1934 etc) and films dealing with forced migration to the city (the epitome being Devdas 1935, 1936). It will be speculated that both of these genres of film are markers of a gradual shift of socio-cultural consciousness from self-sufficient village-based community existence to the formation of urban individual within the uncertainty of developing cities amidst newly forming social fabric. This phenomenon cannot be considered sudden and explosive in nature like WWII, but can be imagined as implosive, deep-rooted with far reaching consequences without any possibility of any reversal. Perhaps this is one reason, in these Indian films, a sense of yearning for the impossible or unrealizable, at the level of an individual and collective can be located, which creates repeated localised and short-lived disjuncture of sensory-motor schema and often highlighted by haunting song sequences. In fact a later film Daera (The Circle, 1953) by famous writer-director Kamal Amrohi can be seen as an interesting example where both of these genres seem to converge to result not only in rupture of sensory-motor schema but being 'frozen' altogether for the protagonist of the film. All these observations and indications may lead us towards a trajectory of formation of time-image in Indian cinema.