Auteur Criticism

• The idea of Author has changed over time. In earlier times

scientific writing was specific but literature was not. Now-a-days it
is the opposite.
• Barthes is against the idea that the author has complete control
and that he and he alone determines what it is. The reader must
interpret the text in his own way. “The birth of the reader must be
at the cost of the death of the author.”
• Mitchel Foucault argues that the name of the author remains at
the contours of texts separating one from the other, defines their
form, and characterizes their existence. Mitchel Foucault while
negating the idea of origin argues that there might be elements in
the margins which contradict the main idea being conveyed in the
text. Author however creates a false sense of unity neutralizing
the contradictions found in the text. He imagines a culture where
discourse would circulate without any need of an author.
Discourses, without regard to their form, values etc would unfold
in pervasive autonomy. Then one is forced to think, “What matter
who’s speaking?”

• The concept of the auteur in film criticism gained prominence

during the heyday of the French New Wave.
• Auteur criticism examines how an auteur’s works form “diverse
networks”. What auteurists seek are the ways in which the films
answer, extend, invert, fulfill, critique, or even destroy each
other.”
• Tagore had a prose style but his last novel almost negated
whatever he had written so far. Hence we see that an author’s
works might form all these diverse networks.
• Dr. Kracauer argued that cinema can be used to record reality and
that this is its highest quality.
• Dr. Kracauer feels that civilization has reached an ideological void.
Western civilization is reaching it’s end due to concerns like cold
war, nuclear war, etc. Hence, he wants cinema to move towards
concretion instead of abstraction because cinema can document
reality and inbound time.
• Ghatak, while giving the example of the success of the soviet
space program (whose scientists claimed that mankind would
reach moon by 1970 and then the universe would be before him)
argues that all hope is not lost.
• Ghatak, however, contradicts this position 2 years later in
Subarnarekha – For a man haunted by past trauma, space success
missions mean nothing.
• Recent studies have shown that Ghatak perhaps misinterpreted
Kracauer. Kracauer is interested in experiencing and encountering
the world as a matter of style rather than only to “document”
reality.
• Subarnarekha – Sister of the protagonist elopes with a lower
caste guy - Identity of the foundling is revealed mid film and he
turns out to be a lower caste guy. Subarnarekha, therefore, has
elements of Indian popular cinema with a twist. There is unusual
camera movement and angles. The film is marked by many
coincidences following a melodramatic structure. Ghatak isn’t
focused on the characters but on the environment, the
atmosphere. These are some of the authorial choices that an
author makes that makes it their signature style.
 FILM CRITICISM CHECKLIST
- Intro – body – conclusion (summarize but don’t include new info)
- Your reactions, emotions etc and WHY did they occur? What was
there in the film that made you experience them?
- What was their message and how did they achieve that?
- What you want to be there but isn’t there.
- Describe and comment – Write one sentence that describes the
essence of the sequence. This should be specific and should
create an effect.
- Go beyond description – How it opens out onto other films,
worlds, histories and political landscapes.
- Follow the sequence – What is happening inside and outside the
scene?; How is the camera placed?; How is the soundtrack? The
lighting? Sets?
 Experimental Cinema
- Characteristics: -
• Alternative history of cinema.
• Non-narrativity.
• Alternative economic model.
• A different framework for production-distribution-exhibition.
• Exploration of the cinematic medium itself (16 mm, Super 8 etc.)
• Affinities with modernist literature and visual arts.
• Physical/material engagement with the film (painting, scratching
on film)
• Unconventional editing
• Non-diegetic sound
• Absence of sound
• Audience is not targeted
• superposition

- Mostly American and Austrian cinema produced experimental

films. Some French groups produced them too.
- Maya Deren was interested in exploring the unconscious in a non-
narrative way. Many of her films seemed like recollections of a
dream.
- Stan Brakhage recreated hell through a moving painting. His films
have a very strong similarity with Jackson Pollock’s paintings who
employed drip method of painting with the canvas on the ground
amongst other things.
- Brakhage was very interested in the primal things in human life
like birth, sex, death etc.
- He scratched the reel physically to gauge out the eyes in one of
his films – experimenting with the medium.
- Mothlight (1963): filmed without a camera, moth wings, flower
petals and blades of grass pressed between two strips of 16mm
tape. Then printed and projected – experimenting with the
medium, superposition.
- In “From Metaphors to Vision”, he shuns the idea that camera can
only be used to document reality ie absolute realism and resists
the renaissance perspective.
- In “The man with the movie camera”, Dziga Vertov makes use of
natural superimposition created by the glass windows of the train.
- “In his third work, Desistfilm (1954), he liberated his camera from
its tripod and filmed a teen-age party, with five boys and only one
girl. He successfully objectified the argument between Realism
and Expressionism that was informing his art.
- The film-maker scratched with a sharp instrument on the film
stock itself, so that a set of brilliant white stars shimmers over the
blind man’s eyes, changing slightly from frame to frame.
- Dog Star Man describes the birth of consciousness, the cycle of
the seasons, man’s struggle with nature, and sexual balance in the
visual evocation of a fallen titan bearing the cosmic name of the
Dog Star Man.
 Digital Cinema
Colossal Youth
It is not a documentary, nor is it a traditional narrative film. It comprises very
long, mostly static shots of the residents of a rundown district of Lisbon. At its
centre is Ventura, who, abandoned by his wife, is about to be relocated to a
housing project from the slums he's used to, and who wanders his
neighbourhood, dropping in on a motley band of unfortunates he erroneously
calls his 'children'. The time Costa gives to these disenfranchised voices feels
radical in itself, but through repetition of mantra-like dialogue and the
director's meticulously controlled style, the film's dreadful ennui becomes
hallucinatory.
Restricted space, masterfully delineated with natural light, becomes a
resonance chamber for physical presences and voices differentiated and
modulated like musical instruments.
The exquisitely composed, naturally lit chiaroscuro of Colossal Youth
(2006), shot in the surviving ruins of one Lisbon slum and around a high-
rise in another, combines realism and expressionism, Louis Lumiere and
Jacques Tourneur.

CHARACTERISTICS OF DIGITAL CINEMA

Slowness – In analog, the reel ends after 10 mins but that is not the case in digital
cinema
Digital cinema as liberation
Sharing of films leading to better correspondence amongst film enthusiasts
 South Indian Cinema
• Southern states marked by fan culture, the excessively eccentric
behavior of the fan in and outside the exhibition space and the
stars crossing over to the domain of politics.
• Janaki Nair has noted in her urban history of Bangalore how the
angry Rajkumar fans reclaimed the city by vandalism when the
star was kidnapped by Virappan (“Why should there be a
Bangalore if there is no Rajkumar in it?”)
• Fans, sometimes, are transformed into party-cadres as the stars
retire and cross over to politics. Kerala is the only exception to
this rule.
• Three major stars (MGR, NTR and Rajkumar) from the three
industries, two of them became chief ministers of their respective
states.

- Making Meaning of Fan Culture

• Film society critics like Chidananda Dasgupta criticized the
gullible mass for their infantile electoral behavior
• It is said that they cannot distinguish between the mythological
roles played by the star on screen and the star in real
• For the anthropologists and sociologists in the West (Sara
Dickey, Robert Hardgrave Jr. et al), it is an exotic phenomenon
where the stars literally displace the gods
• This “gullibility thesis” (M. Madhava Prasad has branded it as a
“product of anthropology”) has recently been challenged by
film scholars
• S. V. Srinivas’ path breaking work on Telugu cinema and fan
culture opened up a new horizon
• Srinivas’ extensive research has yielded unexpected results, he
has successfully argued that the fan’s loyalty is conditional (the
star must live up to expectations of the fan)
• The fan determines the on and off-screen choices of the star
(for instance, the star cannot die on screen)
• Without being gullible and infantile, the fan is often interested
in fulfilling his own social, political, economic and cultural
ambitions using the image of the star.
• Mass film (a journalistic term) became the norm because of the
star-system, the fan phenomenon and a different tax-regime
known as slab system (flat tax rates on the total number of
seats in the theatre and not on occupancy rates) in NTR’s time.
• Theatre owners/distributors/exhibitors forced the industry to
produce star-vehicles (popular commercial potboilers with big
stars) so that they can ensure a large audience throughout the
season. Many of the fans were repeat customers.
• What is cine-politics?
• It doesn’t mean cinema and politics but cinema as politics
• Relevant issues: linguistic identity politics, caste politics,
cinema as a public institution, cinema’s democratic
possibilities, subaltern mobilization, linguistic reorganization of
the southern states
• Contrary to the older perception, it was not mythologicals but
socials that represented the three stars as representatives of
the people.
• These films are: NTR-starrer Kathanayakudu (1969), MGR-
starrer Nam Naadu (1969) and Rajkumar-starrer Mayor
Muthanna (1969).
• In each of these, the stars emerge as representatives of the
people.
• Caste politics: Cinema offering democratic possibilities
associated with capitalism and modernity as opposed to the
pre-cinema art forms such as classical music and dance (they
were exclusively for the upper caste).
• Linguistic identity politics: Male stars representing their
respective linguistic communities, they are substituting the
politicians/elected representatives as linguistic/ethnic
identities must be asserted.
• Madhava Prasad, while discussing South Indian cinema’s
complex electoral-political linkage, critically considers the
problems within the Indian democratic system of
representation and notes how fan bhakti is an instance of
subaltern sovereignty. The crisis of sovereignty in the Indian
republic gives rise to this, and the political career of film stars is
a direct outcome of this, where the star figure becomes the
representative of a community, something which mainstream
politics failed to offer them
• According to Srinivas, NTR’s invocation of Teluguness is a
curious thing, it was shaped by NTR’s use of a pseudo-classical
Telugu in his electoral speech (Srinivas branded it as
mythological speech) and it resulted in misrecognition
(Srinivas’ coinage), which can be understood as misrecognizing
 the spectator assembled before the screen/political meeting as
the Telugu nation.
• The fan in NTR’s electoral rallies/meetings has assembled for
political purposes, he has “returned to the cinema, whose
pleasures the biggest star of the industry recalls from the
political platform” (Srinivas)
• The stars such as NTR made ‘campaign films’ before entering
into their political career, films that helped them in shaping the
latter
• Chiranjeevi also came up with a number of films for a
makeover of his screen image as he could not afford remaining
a screen rowdy (the term rowdy is associated with the fan as
subaltern and petty criminal)

- BUT THERE IS PERHAPS A DECISIVE SHIFT, DESPITE THE

PERSISTENCE OF A FEUDAL MODE OF STARDOM IN TELUGU
CINEMA

• Two things signify the changing notions of cine-politics in South

India
• The changing nature of the star as manifested in the career of
Rajinikanth
• The changing nature of the industry where the filmmakers such as
S. Shankar and S. S. Rajamouli become the highest grossing stars.
• For Prasad, these filmmakers stand for a “global-capitalist, digital-
age style” of filmmaking and the star, Rajinikanth, is the
“commodity” now
• Thus political surplus is transformed into an investible economic
surplus ; So the ‘Rajinimania’ in media is the “celebration of the
triumph of profit over rent, the trumping of politics by
economics”

• Evolution of the regional blockbuster such as Baahubali is an

indication of a “fundamental transformation of industrial-political
logics of the south Indian cinemas, whose most visible
manifestations so far have been the star politician and fan clubs”
(Srinivas)
• According to Srinivas, the older model of (super)stardom is
hindering the Bollywoodization (dissemination of cinema into
various elements other than the film-text) of South Indian
cinemas
• Rajinikanth’s career is an entry point to this domain of
transformation as his recent films take “considerable liberties
with the star’s image” (Srinivas)