Talk by Prof. Ratheesh

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Centre for Comparative literature School of Humanities University of Hyderabad a talk by 5 Prof. Ratheesh Radhakirshnan (IIT Bombay) S NEW WAVES ON OLD SHORES? E I A PRE-HISTORY OF ‘NEW INDIAN R CINEMA’ E Abstract: In industrial and intellectual discourse, cinema in India appears as discrete language entities, while in the domain of industrial practices such discrete entities rarely obtain. The S emergence of “New Indian Cinema” (NIC), especially in Kannada and Malayalam and to some extent in Telugu, often with active support of the state, is described as a moment when such a discrete industrial practice consolidated in South India. This argument is debatable and should be E examined on its own terms. The argument of a radical break is untenable. Film practices that constitute the NIC in language cinemas of South India, as I am sure elsewhere, had both a pre- history and an investment in regions that are not bound by language. R In this talk, I try to begin an examination of such a pre-history, keeping the discussion of NIC’s own practices for another day. I take a step back in history, to a period preceding the emergence U of the NIC, to the 1960s. I examine the discourse of Malayalam cinema as it appeared discretised in the domain of print, and the aesthetic choices in select Malayalam language films. I hope to T open up three sites. One is the discourse of ‘newness’ as it appeared in industrial practice (advertisements) and in popular discourse (film journalism) prior to the emergence of NIC, engendering a recognition of the ‘New’ in NIC. The second is the deployment of bound and C unbound spaces in the construction of the film image – the studio floor and the outdoor location – to understand the meaning that ‘location shooting’ accrued over time. Third, I discuss the E reportage of two accidents on film locations, in 1965 and 1970. Here an encounter between technology, labouring bodies and the elements, in these cases water, and to a lesser extent the L invocation of enumerated social identities such as the fisherman and the adivasi, becomes central to the emergence of a new aesthetic founded on ‘location’, rounding off the story of the emergence of the NIC. L C 15 February | 3 PM C Meeting ID: 921 9024 8469 | Passcode: 6789 Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/92190248469? pwd=c3oxUGxrcHFnQVJmM1dLZEEyOXJ6dz09 Ratheesh Radhakrishnan teaches at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, where he offers courses on literature and cinema. He did his Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (Bangalore) and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chao Center for Asian Studies, Rice University (Houston, Texas). His research mostly focuses on Malayalam language cinema, stardom and film festivals. He is currently working on a manuscript based on a biographical study of the Malayalam star Sathyan, supported by the New India Foundation. He has also worked as a programmer with MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Kerala, and founded and curated TITLES: Festival of Experimental Films from India held at Rice University between 2011 and 2014..

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The Conference Brochure
The Many Lives of Indian Cinema: 1913-2013 and beyond Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi 9-11 January 2014 1 Credits Concept: Ravi Vasudevan Production: Ishita Tiwary Operations: Ashish Mahajan Programme coordinator: Tanveer Kaur Infrastructure: Sachin Kumar, Vikas Chaurasia Consultant: Ravikant Audio-visual Production: Ritika Kaushik Print Design: Mrityunjay Chatterjee Cover Image: Mrityunjay Chatterjee Back Cover Image: Shahid Datawala, Sarai Archive Staff of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies We gratefully acknowledge support from the following institutions: Indian Council for Social Science Research; Arts and Humanities Research Council; Research Councils UK; Goethe Institute, Delhi; Indian Council for Historical Research; Sage Publishing. Doordarshan have generously extended media partnership to the conference. Images in the brochure are selected from Sarai Archive collections. Sponsors Media Partner 2 The Idea Remembering legendary beginnings provides us the occasion to redefine and make contemporary the history we set out to honour. We need to complicate the idea of origins and `firsts’ because they highlight some dimensions of film culture and usage over others, and obscure the wider network of media technologies, cultural practices, and audiences which made cinema possible. In India, it is a matter of debate whether D.G. Phalke's Raja Harishchandra (1913), popularly referred to as the first Indian feature film, deserves that accolade. As Rosie Thomas has shown, earlier instances of the story film can be identified, includingAlibaba (Hiralal Sen, 1903), an Arabian Nights fantasy which would point to the presence of a different cultural universe from that provided by Phalke's Hindu mythological film. Such a revisionary history is critical to our research agenda.
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