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1 Efficacy on the screen
The unseen and the workings of gaze and sound
Film as intensified reality
Popular Hindi cinema creates an intensified reality – a reality that makes the unseen present, manifested and efficaciously embodied within the apparatus. It can be traced in elements within the cinematic visual language that echo the experience imposed on the spectator. Film and film-going are an apparition, a vision, a ritual. In Durkheim’s classic structural interpretation of rites, all celebrations include some features of the religious ritual: the power to bring people together, to move and stimulate them, and thus to provide a certain sense of abandon or sensual intoxication akin to an ecstatic state in which daily occupations and hardships – as well as the boundaries of the phenomenal self – are transcended (1912/1965: 427–428). In the Indian context, these features all contribute to the potent, soteriological capacity attributed to the medium.
The cinematic experience as a rite
The cinematic experience can be described as a sequence that involves: leaving the house or daily environment; going to the theatre which is often located, like a temple, in the centre of the community; entering the movie theatre; seeing the lights go gradually out; watching the film; watching the lights go back on; and finally, the return to daily life and its activities (Darrol-Bryant 1982: 112–113). The ritualistic nature of film-going has been ascribed to the repetitive quality of this sequence, which gives the cinematic experience its dramatic structure and differentiates it from daily experience. Each step in the sequence can have symbolic significance. forming a hierarchy between empirical reality and the order shaped, induced and manifested by the medium.
This detachment from daily life is cinema’s most significant feature. It differentiates the secular course of time (‘profane’, in Eliadean 1957 terms) from the time paced by the cinematic medium. Film-going suggests an abandonment of the mundane: it disrupts any sequence of events and activities, severs time and spatial successions. The classic cinema theatre forms an isolated space. Despite its location in the centre of the community, it is impenetrable on all sides and cuts spatial links with the surroundings; nor does it permit any other activity. The spectator is engulfed by a territory that expropriates him or her of any sequence, suspends the course of time and demands a certain passivity,1 responsiveness, total devotion and concentration on the images and the world onscreen.
The medium’s demand for totality on the part of the spectator is also achieved by obscuring the cinema hall. The darkening room signifies the effacement of phenomenal space and time, as well as a symbolic withdrawal from the phenomenal self, which is suspended or repressed while absorbed in the dark. In various schools of Indian philosophy, the suspension of the phenomenal self is associated with the highest of goals and is endowed with a liberating potential. It echoes the Nāgārjunian notion of
ūnyatā (emptiness, voidness), which impacted the Vedāntist philosopher Śa
kara. In his introduction to the
Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāśya, Śa
kara distinguished between the immaterial, immortal silent essence (
ātman), and the conventional, empirical self. When the latter is diminished, the former may be exposed.
2The darkening of the theatre hall can elicit this retreat from the empirical self and introduces the phenomenal self to a hierarchy in which the phenomenal world becomes blurred, disappears in the dark, symbolically annulled, expropriated or cancelled, while at the same time a different world, reality and order are presented on the screen. This order demands total attention, presides over space, and reveals grandiose images outlined as a light in the darkness.3 The cinematic concealment of the phenomenal world through darkness creates an aperture for an ontological hierarchy ascribing a higher validity to the filmic order over the phenomenal (see Chapter 3).
Cinema is an intensified reality inviting the spectator to take part in its exalted, celebrated order, nature and consciousness. Paradoxically, this capacity depends on the medium’s ability to produce a sort of reality, a world comprising dimensions of space and time, as well as sights and sounds that appear realistic. At the same time, the cinematic images, sights, sounds, as well as time and space, fundamentally differ from the laws of natural reality. This facilitates the interpretation of cinema as embodying a reality, though not a natural, empirical one.
Mimicking the empirical, transcending the empirical
Born in the West in the late nineteenth century, the medium of cinema appears to be the indubitable product of modernism, industrialisation and secularisation. From an aesthetic angle, cinema represents the culmination of the desire for realistic representations, which has been part of the history of Western visual arts in the last few centuries. The medium is capable of imitating the empirical with unprecedented success by generating ever more realistic images, natural displays of movement and the simultaneity of sight, sound and motion, all of which seem to fulfil the secular wish to identify the ontologically valid with the visible and empirical.
However, in spite of its apparent secularised background and premises, cinema can easily be linked with a wish to transcend the phenomenal. MacBean, when discussing Bazin, suggested that cinema is the medium in which reality can shed its material mantle and aim for a pure metaphysical sphere (1975: 101–102).4 In addition, the Eliadian concept of hierophany, denoting the capacity to manifest the sacred within ‘secular’ reality, may help understand the non-empirical features that the medium can convey (Eliade 1960/1975: 124; Bird Film as Hierophany 1982). This point is especially important in understanding the workings of popular Hindi cinema.
Despite and because of its ability to represent phenomenal reality, the medium of cinema shapes an order that deviates entirely from the natural, empirical one. It draws on images, figures and acts from the phenomenal world and then depletes them of their inherent phenomenal temporality, and reproduces them as fixed, stable and immortal.5 Similar inferences can be applied to movement, which symbolises vitality, transience and hence ephemerality, and to the dimensions of time and space that appear to imitate empirical time and space but in fact detach them from any natural law.
Cinematic time consists of shots, whether filmed on classical celluloid or digitally, which are spliced together during the editing process. From an evasive and uncontrollable element in the phenomenal world, cinematic time becomes a plastic substance, which can be manipulated, shrunk, stretched and repeated. Cinematic time cancels the elusive flow of phenomenal time, severs the linearity of the flow of history (also in the terms of histoire, the narrative) and eliminates the inaccessibility of past and future.
The cinematic space combines separate shots, which also detaches it from the fetters of the phenomenal. Using simple cuts, the medium can eliminate the space (and ...
