The first lines in Richard Allen and Murray Smith’s “Introduction” to their edited book Film Theory and Philosophy are as follows:
It is widely recognized that the field of film studies is in a state of flux, or even crisis or impasse…it is during such periods of relative intellectual insecurity that new connections and alliances may be forged, new perspectives discovered, and old questions recast in fresh and dynamic ways.1
What is the “crisis” the authors are talking about? David Bordwell (1947–) and Noël Carroll (1947–) have subsequently devoted a whole book, Post-Theory: Restructuring Film Studies,2 in noting the contours of this “crisis” and seeking deliverance from it. Briefly stated, the above film theorists hold that the “crisis” has primarily resulted from the existing film theories’ deliberate adoption of an intellectual approach to cinema at the cost of the ordinary film goers’ normal response to cinema. The contemporary film discourse preferred to advocate how the audiences should respond to cinema rather than how they actually experience cinema.
The basic reason identified by the above authors for such a turn of events is the employment of disembodied vision as the privileged tool of film analysis which totally relegated to the background the audiences’ embodied experiences of cinema. It is, however, these affective experiences which largely determine the audiences’ most basic engagements with cinema. In the above context, my work seeks to examine how classical Indian theories respond to ordinary peoples’ every day experiences of cinema.
In the course of my research, I found that all classical Indian theories are ultimately bracketed by human beings’ habitual experiences of the world, which includes their embodied experiences, the socio-cultural practices they have built around them, and the experiences taught to them through ‘formal’ teachings and trainings given by the society. Indeed, for all classical Indian theories, the ultimate criterion of success is the “practical results” they achieve in the empirical world. In the above sense, since these theories appear to be based on the peoples’ normal responses to the world, they may be said to represent a theory of the ordinary for ordinary human beings’ engagement with cinema at the most basic level of their being. Since these theories had already been extended to the fields of aesthetics and arts in classical India, I argue that they could be easily applied to cinema as well. In the course of doing such an application, while I might have ended up with what may be called an “Indian film theory” in an embryonic form, I do not, however, seek to replace the Western film theories with an Indian one. Rather, I prefer to see the theory of the ordinary that classical Indian theories throw up as a counterfoil to the Western theories’ intellectualization of cinema with the hope that the two together would make film studies whole again.3
I start my work by analyzing the emergence and branching out of film theories during the twentieth century and their limitations in dealing with cinema. Developments in Marxism and Psychology during the nineteenth and early twentieth century led to the idea that both human psyche and intelligence could be conditioned by forces beyond individual’s conscious control. Thus, for Marx (1818–1883), the social means of production conditioned human consciousness that severely circumscribed their freedom of action, which, when used by oppressive social regimes, became instrumental in the repression of the individuals concerned.4 Marx sought human freedom through social revolution where the proletariat would own all means of production, the basis for setting up a classless society.
While, for Marx, a collective liberation was still considered possible, for Freud (1856–1939), however, repressed human desires, which significantly motivated their conscious actions on the surface, could only be sublimated in individual cases by adopting certain psycho-analytic processes.5 These theories indicated, among others, that the notion human “intelligence” could no more be considered as “free” as Descartes had once thought. It put a question mark on the age of the reason which had preceded the above theories in Europe.
When the Marxist theory was in its prime during the first half of the twentieth century, cinema had just arrived on the scene. As cinema gathered momentum, the first significant film theory to emerge was the theory of montage formulated by the early Soviet filmmakers, Lev Kuleshov (1899–1970), Psevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953), Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), and Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) during the early 1920s and 1930s. With the Russian revolution fresh in their minds, these Soviet filmmakers devised montage practices in cinema as an innovation which used juxtaposition of discontinuous pieces of social reality not only to de-naturalize the audience’s bourgeois conditioning effects but also to produce “new” social meanings from them. Thus, for example, in contrast to the Hollywood filmmakers’ practice of ensuring the primacy of continuity of action on the surface, in the early Soviet cinema, Kuleshov developed the montage practice of generating different meanings by juxtaposing the same image of a person in different contexts. Thus, for example, while the image of a person juxtaposed with a bowl of soup would “mean” to the viewers that the person is “hungry,” the same image juxtaposed with a child playing with balloons or a dead child in a coffin would “mean” the person’s “happiness” or “sadness” respectively. The Kuleshov experiments were, however, criticized by Eisenstein on the ground that, since, even the juxtaposed “discontinuous pieces” only portrayed different experiences of the bourgeois life, they did not create any condition for socially revolutionary thinking among the audiences. Terming the Kuleshov experiments as “linkage montage,” Eisenstein sought to substitute them by what he called “collision montage” where two “discontinuous pieces” could not be linked up with each other in any way which would force the viewers to go beyond conventional “meanings” produced by the society in order to understand them. A common juxtaposition in Eisenteins’ films was between a capitalist and his workers indicating that the exploiter and the exploited cannot be reconciled under normal circumstances. It is important to emphasize the primacy of the editing process in the Soviet montage theory on the basis of which new “meanings” were created for the audiences. However, in their zeal to ‘educate’ the masses so that they can rise against the bourgeois reality, these filmmakers completely disregarded the audiences’ normal experiences of cinema. Ultimately, however, the Soviet authorities clamped down on these filmmakers on the ground that these experiments were becoming too esoteric for the ordinary masses. In the process, however, the Soviet authorities failed to notice the gains that were made in constructing a new language of cinema. The ceasing and destruction of the film footage of Eisenstein’s film Bezhin Meadows (1937) and the posthumous release of his film Ivan the Terrible Part II (1944) in 1958 told their own stories.
The next film theory to follow was the theory of realism in cinema formulated by the French film critic André Bazin (1918–1958) and the German film historian Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) during the 1940s and 1950s. Their theories initially had a phenomenological streak in them when they held that human beings’ natural relationship with Nature from where they had come and the world where they lived formed their own experiences of life which were “revealed” to them directly rather than through an interpretative process as held by the montage theorists. Both Bazin and Kracauer thought that, since the cinematographic instrument has the ability to record “reality as it is,” it could enable the audiences to establish a natural relationship with reality. While critiquing the editing process championed by the Soviet filmmakers as a manipulative practice, Bazin recommended the use of depth of field, long take, and staging-in-depth as the preferred film practices in cinema which maintained the integrity of space and time being projected on screen.6 In their effort to establish a deeper, natural connection between the audiences and the projected reality, the medium specificity of camera became the preferred choice of the realist filmmakers.
Together called the Classical Film Theory, both montage and realist schools were, however, imbued with the same aim of educating the masses about the true nature of reality. Even though t...