Postcolonial Studies, 2014, Vol. 17, No.

4, 382–414

‘Our films, their films’:1 postcolonial

critique of the cinematic apparatus
DANIEL L SELDEN
The task I am trying to achieve is above all to make you see.
D W Griffith (1913)

Myths of total cinema

Postcolonial filmmaking, insofar as it seeks to make an intervention in dominant
visual regimes tied to the economy of the contemporary world system, has tended
to come to ruin on the shoals of a politics of liberation that seeks to realize itself
through an aesthetics of transparence. This is the irony that Jean-Luc Godard
captures in Le petit soldat (1960), in a maxim that has since become a watchword
for the antinomies of cinematic expression: La photographie, c’est la vérité, et le
cinéma, c’est vingt-quatre fois la vérité par seconde (Figure 1). In reassessing the
efficacy of post-imperialist cinema, Satyajit Ray offers a particularly instructive
point of departure, not only on account of the metropolitan accolades immediately
accorded Pather Panchali (1955) and the films that followed in its wake, but
more so given recent claims for Ray’s capacity ‘to realize a politicized vision
of aesthetics’,2 the ideal—ultimately traceable to Friedrich Schiller’s Über die
ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1794)3—of every director from D W
Griffith to Abbās Kiyārostamī and Wong Kar Wai.
Curiously, however, in published interviews and essays, Ray repeatedly refused
to position his work either in relation to the Rāj or in connection with the
emergence of Bhārat as a nation-state. Rather, he chose to situate his cinema
within an oecumenical film history recast according to the Miltonic typology of
‘paradise lost’. In the silent era, Ray maintained, ‘film-makers of the world
formed one large family. Using the technique of mime, which is more or less
universally understood, they turned cinema into a truly international medium’
(Figures 2 and 3). As such, for Ray, the silent era represented an Edenic moment
in the constellation of the medium where filmmakers collectively forged a
universal language—erected on what Aby Warburg called Pathosformeln4—
which not only succeeded in overcoming local differences, but united audiences
around the world collectively in a form of global semiological transparence.
With the advent of sound, however, cinema—on Ray’s account—fell from its
Adamic state into a Babel of diverse national idioms that were no longer mutually
intelligible across the globe. While films such as F W Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)
or Sergei Eizenštein’s Stačka (‘Strike’ [1924]) already constituted clear stylistic
deviations from the visual and diegetic heritage of Griffith (Figures 4 and 5), with
the release of Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927), the first feature-length film
to employ extended sequences of synchronized sound, cinema began to fracture
© 2015 Daniel L. Selden
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2014.986020
 ‘OUR FILMS, THEIR FILMS’

Figure 1.
J-L Godard, Une femme mariée (1964)

Figure 2.
D W Griffith, Hearts of the World (1919)

Figure 3.
Germaine Dulac, La souriante Madame Beudet (1922)

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Figure 4.
F W Murnau, Nosferatu (1922)

Figure 5.
Sergei Eizenštein, Strike (1924)

Figure 6.
Ozu Yasujirō, Late Spring (1949)
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into a series of idiolects that did not readily transcend the country or—in the case
of India and China—the region of their origin: German Expressionism; Soviet
Montage; Italian Neorealism; the French New Wave; New German Cinema;
Bengali over and against Hindi or Marathi film production; Shanghai (Mandarin)
versus Hong Kong (Cantonese) cinema, and so forth. The barriers here were not
only linguistic, but also narrative and cultural: competence in Nihongo aside, how
much of Ozu Yasujirō’s quietly elliptical Banshun (‘Late Spring’ [1949]) were
audiences in Cairo likely to have understood? (Figure 6)
The semiotic opacity implicit in sound cinema—tethered as it was to the
arbitrariness of natural language—nonetheless permitted film, as Ray put it, ‘an
enormous step towards realism, and a consequent enrichment of the medium as an
expression of the ethos of a particular country’, the standard to which Ray would
hold both his own work and that of his contemporaries for the duration of his
career, citing Robert Flaherty, Jean Renoir and Vittorio De Sica in particular as
benchmarks in the emergence of cinematic realism. From this it becomes apparent
that Ray’s Miltonic history of the cinema actually constitutes an allegory of the
representational capacities of the medium. If the first moment in Ray’s dialectic is
transparence, which passes over into a second moment of obstruction, their
mutual negation finds its Aufhebung in what Ray called ‘realism’—a mode of
mimēsis, situated precisely at the coincidence of la transparence et l’obstacle,
which provides the impression of objectivity through the intuition of parochial
details along lines that—as the opening shot of Mahānagar (1963) makes clear—
remain fundamentally metonymic (Figure 7).5
As such, then, cinema constitutes a regimen of ‘Truth’ whose verity emerges
from the intuition of local—which is to say, contiguous—details, such as the train
and power lines which in Pather Panchali (1955; Figure 8) gesture indexically
toward a world beyond the rural. Just as the eponymous heroine of Chārulatā
(1964) rejects the pretension of her cousin Amal’s overwrought Romantic poetry
to write ‘naturalistically’ instead about her native village in Bengal—what
Ray presents as a series of disparate local particulars superimposed over her
pensive face: a river, boats, a village fair, kites, fireworks, an old woman
spinning6 (Figure 9)—so an extreme close-up of the jaded actor on whom Nayak
(1966) centres presents an assemblage of singular details (brown skin, dark hair, a
white collar, dark suit, a white telephone receiver, black sunglasses, etc) that for
all their fragmentation form a ‘realist’ as opposed to ‘cubist’-style composition—a
salient example of what Eizenštein called ‘montage within the frame’ (Figure 10).
Like all Neorealists, however, what Ray trades in here, of course, is not the
‘real’ per se—which in Jacques Lacan’s well-known definition constitutes ‘that
which resists symbolization absolutely’.7 Rather, he calculates his films to
produce what Roland Barthes referred to as l’effet de réel—‘the reality
effect’8—which in Lacanian terms belongs in part to the imaginary (trauma) and
in part to the symbolic (exchange). As Ray himself stressed in interviews from
1968 and 1978 respectively: ‘A film that gives the impression of spontaneity is in
nine cases out of ten the result of a high degree of preparation and discipline,
which are then applied to the creative process [as a whole] … It’s not naturalistic
but let’s call it “realistic.”’9 So Devi (1960) opens emblematically with a series of
jump cuts that gradually add eye paint and other adornments to an otherwise plain
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Figure 7.
Satyajit Ray, Mahānagar (1963)

Figure 8.
Satyajit Ray, Pather Panchali (1955)

bust of Kālī, great Mother and merciless Destroyer, thereby raising the question—
which subtends the film’s diegetic indeterminacy as a whole—as to whether
the serial application of particulars makes the object more ‘objective’, or—in
actuality—renders it more phantasmatic (Figures 11–13).

Camera obscura
Strikingly, across hundreds of essays and interviews, Ray has little to say about
the camera per se, much less about the camera as a tool for political intervention.
In a 1969 essay on ‘The Question of Reality’, he states: ‘The sharpest revelations
of the truth in cinema come from the details perceived through the eyes of
artists.’10 To put this another way, Ray envisions an unmediated relationship
between the mind of the director and the particulars of the profilmic, suppressing
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Figure 9.
Satyajit Ray, Chārulatā (1964)

Figure 10.
Satyajit Ray, Nayak (1966)
the camera completely as if it were merely a passive device for recording what the
artist sees. On the one hand this implies, in Ray’s own words: ‘The film-maker’s
ego is an indispensable part of his equipment’, suggesting—as Bidyut Sarkar
noted—‘that the parts of a film must cohere because the film as a whole is the
film-maker or the director as a whole’.11 At the same time, however, Ray also
proved himself a disciple of the formidable French critic André Bazin, who in a
well-known essay of 1945 maintained: ‘The photographic image is the object
itself … and cinema [is] a total and complete representation of reality.’12 As such,
Bazin insisted on ‘the essentially objective character of photography’, though
neither he nor Ray was so naive as to ignore what Ray referred to as the
‘selectivity’ of framing and montage that cinema demands. Overall, then, in Ray’s
view, his craft consisted essentially of an ongoing dialectic between his own ego
and the unmediated ‘reality’ that he saw before him.13
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Figures 11–13.
Satyajit Ray, Devi (1960)
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John Wilson, an anthropologist from the School of Oriental and African Studies
in London, comes to wholly different conclusions than Bazin regarding what
Christian Metz termed the ‘problems of denotation’ in the cinema.14 In the course
of his fieldwork in Africa, Wilson produced a short film in 1960 and showed it to
a group of 30 or so Nigerian villagers:

[The local sanitary inspector] made a [five-minute] moving picture, in very slow time
… of what would be required of the ordinary household in a primitive African village
in getting rid of standing water—draining pools, picking up all empty tins and putting
them away, and so forth. We showed this film to an audience and asked them what
they had seen, and they said they had seen a chicken, a fowl, and we didn’t know
that there was a fowl in it! So we very carefully scanned the frames one by one for
this fowl, and, sure enough, for about a second, a fowl went over the corner of the
frame … This was all that had been seen. The other things we had hoped they would
pick up from the film they had not picked up at all, and they had picked up something
which we didn’t know was in the film until we inspected it minutely … [W]hen we
questioned them further they [said that they] had [also] seen a man, but what was
really interesting was they hadn’t made a whole out of it, and in point of fact, we
discovered afterwards that they hadn’t seen a whole frame—they had inspected the
frame for details. Then we found out from the artist and an eye specialist that a
sophisticated audience, an audience that is accustomed to the film, focuses a little
way in front of the flat screen so that you take in the whole frame. In this sense … a
picture is a convention. You’ve got to look at the picture as a whole first, and these
people did not do that, not being accustomed to pictures. When presented with the
picture they began to inspect it, rather as the scanner of a television camera, and go
over it very rapidly. Apparently, that is what the eye unaccustomed to pictures does—
scans the picture—and they hadn’t scanned one picture before it moved on, in spite
of the slow [pace] of the film.15
Correlatively, the Hungarian theorist Balázs Béla recalls that ‘when [D W]
Griffith first showed a big close-up in [an American theatre] and a huge “severed”
head smiled at the public for the first time, there was a panic in the cinema. We
ourselves no longer know by what intricate evolution of our consciousness we
have learnt … to integrate single disjointed pictures into a coherent scene’
(Figures 14 and 15).16 Balázs also records similar reactions from Siberian
peasants around 1910, as well as among rural Japanese, who were both equally
innocent of the photographic image, thereby giving the lie to Ray’s vision of the
silent era as a prelapsarian moment of universal understanding. To the contrary, it
would seem that cinema, as an institution and a signifying practice, only emerges
after the Fall, always already situated east of Eden.
Even in advance of editing, therefore, one of the principal agents that sutures
the fragments of lived experience into filmic coherence turns out to be the
camera.17 Jean Baudry, in his widely anthologized essay ‘Ideological Effects of
the Basic Cinematic Apparatus’ (1970), stresses that cinematic specificity refers to
a certain work, that is, to a process of transformation of the profilmic which the
camera performs. In other words, between ‘objective reality’ and the camera,
considered as a site of inscription, and between this inscription and its projection
onto a screen, a certain operation takes place which has as its result a wholly
manufactured product. To the extent, however, that this product stands cut off
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Figure 14.
D W Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Figure 15.
D W Griffith, Intolerance (1916)

from the raw material that it reworks, it conceals the nature of the transformation
that has taken place. The German art historian Erwin Panofsky—in his study Die
Perspektive als symbolische Form (1927)—was among the first to point out that
the main work which the camera performs consists of recasting natural, spheroid
vision into the geometric abstraction of perspectiva artificialis—that is, single-
point perspective, an artificial spatial construction, appearing to give depth to the
image or allowing the viewer to peer past what is in actually a flat plane, by
making all lines meet at a common vanishing point situated on the pictorial
horizon—Italian artists called this perspectiva, which the German painter
Albrecht Dürer translated precisely as Durchsehen, that is, ‘a seeing through’
(Figures 16 and 17).

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Figures 16–17.
Linear perspective

Working in Cairo in the early tenth century CE, Abū Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan
ibn al-Haytham laid the theoretical foundations for this abstraction in his Kitāb al-
Manāẓir (‘Book of Optics’: 7 vols, 1011–1021 CE), which by the middle of the
fourteenth century reached Europe in Latin as well as in Italian translation. At
Florence, in particular, the Kitāb al-Manāẓir not only influenced Lorenzo
Ghiberti’s celebrated designs for the doors of the Battistero di San Giovanni
(1404–1424) (Figure 18); around 1413, Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated the
geometric bases for the construction of one-point perspective, whose principles
Leon Battista Alberti then codified in his handbook De pictura (1435) (Figure
19). Ernst Cassirer, in his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1924), explains
the significant differences between natural vision, on the one hand, and
perspectiva artificialis, on the other:

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Figure 18.
Lorenzo Ghiberti, Battistero di San Giovanni

Figure 19.
Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura (1435)

[Natural] perception does not know the concept of infinity; from the very outset it is
confined within certain spatial limits imposed by our faculty of perception. And in
connection with perceptual space we can no more speak of homogeneity than of
infinity. The ultimate basis of homogeneity of geometric space is that all its elements,

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Figure 20.
Vredeman de Vries, ‘Architectural Capriccio with Figures’ (1568)
the ‘points’ which are joined in it, are mere determinations of position, possessing no
independent content of their own outside of this relation, this position which they
occupy in relation to each other. Their reality is exhausted in their reciprocal relation:
it is purely a functional and not a substantial reality … Hence homogeneous space is
never given space, but space produced by construction.18

Accordingly, Alberti refers to objects in the pictorial plane as signs (segni) whose
significance as images depends entirely upon the relative relationship that one
bears to another, while his contemporary Antonio Manetti described prospettiva
as ‘the science of accurate and rational placement of diminutions and enlarge-
ments, as they appear to men’s eyes’.19 In essence, then, as Panofsky puts it,
‘perspective transforms psychophysiological space into mathematical space. It
forgets that we see not with a single fixed eye but with two constantly moving
eyes, resulting in a spheroid field of vision.’20 Hence its proper designation:
perspectiva artificialis.
Historically, there is a direct line of descent from Ibn al-Haytham’s optics
through Renaissance perspective painting to the imaginary space generated by
the cinematic apparatus. Starting out from the venerable technology of the
camera obscura (Figure 21), which projects an inverted image in linear
perspective on a wall or screen, nineteenth-century Western Europeans
developed cameras that could take pictures in rapid sequence which, when
rerun through the lens of a projector, turned the moving image right-side up. The
details of the historical development of this apparatus are less important here

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than the fact that the image—as ultimately projected on a screen—reproduces

the abstract geometry of linear, one-point perspective, not the conditions of
natural vision. A photograph or film frame thus constitutes an abstract,
manufactured product that effectively conceals the double transformation—that
is, the work that the camera and the projector do—occluding in the process the
means of transformation so that even the most sophisticated viewer readily
accepts even a black and white film as if it corresponded to what they would
actually see with the naked eye. In this sense, then, the cinema is always already
a neo-Kantian device for intuition (Anschauung), no matter what the source of
its narrative or the preparatory shaping of the raw material may be.

Eye camera film projector screen

Coding

Figure 21.
Camera obscura

Excursus: Linear perspective in film (1900–1960)

Each of the following films is demonstrably central to the history of American
and European cinema.

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Figure 22.
Robert Paul, The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901)

Figure 23.
Charles Chaplin, Easy Street (1917)
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Figure 24.
Fritz Lang, Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922)

Figure 25.
Dziga Vertov, Čelovek s kinoapparatom (1929)
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Figure 26.
Leni Riefenstahl, Triumphs des Willens (1934)

Figure 27.
Orson Welles, Citizen Kane (1941)

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Figure 28.
Roberto Rossellini, Roma città aperta (1945)

Figure 29.
Douglas Sirk, Written on the Wind (1956)

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Figure 30.
Federico Fellini, La dolce vita (1960)

Figure 31.
Alain Resnais, L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1962)

Visual investments
Early Renaissance painters and theoreticians initially associated linear perspective
with the ideal viewpoint from which God sees. Panofsky, however, stresses to the
contrary that geometric space actually turns ousia (reality) into phainomena
(appearance). While the cinematic apparatus purports to place before the eye a
set of ‘realistic’ images, the technology (1) disguises how that reality is spliced
together frame by frame—the so-called ‘Kuleshov effect’; and (2) reduces natural
vision to one-point geometric space.21 This double illusion not only conceals the
adaptation that goes into the cinema’s production of meaning but also, in so
doing, presents as natural what is in fact an ideological construction.22 This
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ideology, Baudry has stressed, remains in turn directly tied to the spectatorial
components of the cinema, which effectively position the viewer as an all-
knowing subject insofar as the film appears to render him [sic!] all-seeing.
Positioned in a theatre—that is in a darkened room, with the eyes facing toward
the screen, where the projection of the film issues from behind the viewer’s
head—an identification occurs between the spectator and the camera as that which
has looked, before the spectator, at what the spectator is looking at now. The film
therefore constructs him as a subject, or to put this otherwise: the autonomous
subject is a reflex of the cinematic apparatus, constructed not only by the
meanings of the film, but more so by the manner of its showing. Baudry spells the
consequences of this out as follows:

Film history shows that as a result of the combined inertia of painting, theater, and
photography, it took a certain time to notice the inherent mobility of the cinematic
mechanism. This ability to reconstitute movement is after all only a partial,
elementary aspect of a more general capability. To seize movement is to become
movement, to follow a trajectory is to become trajectory, to choose a direction is to
have the possibility of choosing one, to determine a meaning is to give oneself a
meaning. In this way the eye-subject, the invisible base of artificial perspective
(which in fact only represents a larger effort to produce an ordering, a regulated
transcendence) becomes absorbed in, ‘elevated’ to a vaster function, proportional to
the movement that it can perform. And if the eye which moves is no longer fettered
by a body, by the laws of matter and time, if there are no assignable limits to its
displacement … the world will be constituted not only by this eye but for it. The
mobility of the camera seems to fulfill the most favorable conditions for the
manifestation of the ‘transcendental subject.’23

In its realization of the Cartesian Cogito and, beyond that, the Transcendental
Aesthetic of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), we should not fail to
recognize that the subject of the cinematic apparatus is also at the same time the
ideal subject of Western imperialism, the subject which arrogates to itself the
phantasm of a movement and appropriation with ‘no assignable limits to its
displacement’ (Figures 23–35). In fact, it is precisely this dialectic between
autonomous objectivity and calculated control that Panofsky saw as the principal
ideological underpinning of perspectiva artificialis:

Perspective creates a distance between human beings and things …; but then in turn it
abolishes this distance by, in a sense, drawing this world of things, an autonomous
world confronting the individual, into the eye. Perspective subjects the artistic
phenomenon to stable and even mathematically exact rules, but on the other hand,
makes that phenomenon contingent upon human beings, indeed upon the individual:
for these rules refer to the psychological and physical conditions of the visual
impression, and the way they take effect is determined by the freely chosen position
of a subjective ‘point of view’. Thus the history of perspective may be understood
with equal justice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying of the real, and as a
triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for control. It is as much a
consolidation and systematization of the world, as an extension of the domain of
the self … In all these questions the ‘claim’ of the object (to use a modern term)
confronts the ambition of the subject. The object (obiectum, Gegenstand) intends to

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Figure 32.
Frederic Church, Sunset (1854)

Figure 33.
Robert Flaherty, Nanook of the North (1922)

Figure 34.
John Ford, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
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Figure 35.
David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

remain distanced from the spectator (precisely as something ‘objective’) … but [it]
exist[s] only in the imagination of the beholder.
In all essential respects, the birth of the cinematic apparatus was monogenetic. A
product of the European West, or, to be more precise, an invention of nineteenth-
century London, Paris and New York, cinema remains not only coincident
with, but to a considerable degree complicit with the ‘great game’ of Western
imperialism. Just as in the seventeenth century, Britons viewed North America
phantasmatically as a vacant space which it was theirs—by divine right—to
coopt, regulate, and hence control so later under the Rāj, Britons both objectified
Bharata and its inhabitants, holding them at bay literally behind walls, at the same
time as they invested the territory with a hierarchical precision and almost
arithmetic discipline—what Matthew Arnold liked to think of as the victory of
culture over anarchy, whose anxieties E M Forster gave voice to in the recesses of
the Malabar Caves.24 Likewise, in the United States, the imperialist eye of
Frederic Church gave eloquent expression to the ‘Manifest Destiny’ that charged
Americans of European descent to colonize what they perceived to be the solitary
wastelands of the West, as well as—somewhat later—the ‘backwaters’ of the
Ottoman East (Figures 34 and 35).25 While the cinema arrives much too belatedly
upon the scene to constitute an actual agent in the consolidation of high capitalist
imperialism, nonetheless its peculiar mode of forming a transcendental subject
where seeing is possessing for an eye liberated from localized particulars to invest
its vision—which is to say its ownership—elsewhere (in Africa, in Asia, in
Australia, in South America), the cinematic apparatus remains clearly of a piece
with all colonialist and neocolonialist endeavours and continues to serve as one of
the principal ideological agents of American ‘soft colonization’ up through the
present day. One need only compare a seventeenth-century Mughal painting of an
elephant to a Dutch print of about a century later to appreciate the difference
between the classical Indic aesthetic of visual presentation and the modern
Western mode of cooptation (Figures 36 and 37).
That the cinema is a Western technology for pictorial reproduction has not gone
unrecognized by any matter of means. To return for the moment to Bengal, Ray
stated in 1982:

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Figure 36.
Mughal miniature (c 1645 CE)

Figure 37.
Dutch print (c 1725)

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Film, as a purely technological medium of expression, developed in the West. The

concept of an art form existing in time is a Western concept, not an Indian one. So in
order to understand cinema as a medium, it helps if one is familiar with the West and
Western art forms. A Bengali folk artist, or a primitive artist, will not be able to
understand the cinema as an art form. Someone who has had a Western education is
definitely at an advantage.26
The Bengali folk artist here serves the same function in Ray’s argument as the
Siberian peasants do for Balázs Béla.27 Conveniently forgetting that Indian music
also unfolds in time, what concerns Ray in this interview is cinematic temporality
per se, which involves the diegesis—a complex topic to be sure28—which
Ray suggests requires an entire Western education in order to be fully understood.
For Ray, then, cinema’s roots in Western Europe are not simply ‘accidental’—
συμβεβηκός τι, as Aristotle would have put it—but rather of its essence (ἐν τῷ τι
ἐστὶ καθ’ ἁυτό), making thorough acquaintance with Western ideology a sine qua
non. Once again, Ray remains silent about the camera but—differences in
temporality aside—the question that faces us today is rather this: what happens
when the one-point perspective essential to the cinematic apparatus—with its
inevitable imposition of the Cartesian Cogito—turns its lights on non-Western
subjects or material. With a considerable degree of passion, though perhaps also
with an equal amount of naivety, the mid-1950s generation of Third Cinema
directors—the Argentinean Fernando Birri, for example—advocated a ‘cinema of
discovery’ that would offer a ‘real’ image of Latin America in contradistinction to
such Hollywood extravaganzas as Flying Down to Rio (1933; Figure 38) or the
exoticism of Carmen Miranda and Yma Sumac (Figure 39). Both in his theoretical
writings, as well as in the gritty, slum realism of his films, Birri explicitly
advocated,

showing how reality is, and in no other way. By testifying, critically, to this reality—
to this sub-reality, this misery—cinema refuses it. It rejects it. It denounces, judges,
criticizes and deconstructs it. Because it shows matters as they irrefutably are, and not
as we would like them to be (or as, in good or bad faith, others would like to make us
believe them to be).29

Not only, as we have seen, is the notion of a ‘realist’ cinema at all levels a self-
serving phantasm produced by the pictorial and rhetorical organization of the
films themselves, designed to ‘naturalize’ their ideological effects; Birri does not
bother to question the implications of the camera or the replacement of natural
vision by the artificial devices of Renaissance perspective. One shot from Birri’s
Los inundados (1961) shows how the ‘truth’ about Argentina when denaturalized
through perspectiva artificialis brings in again as if through the back door the
very type of imperialist subjectivity of which Birri hopes to rid his film (Figure
40). The same contradiction appears in a movie such as Jalsāghar (1958), where
Ray plays off the zamindar’s nouveau riche neighbour—pointedly associated
with Western technology, music, taste, and so forth—against the outmoded pride
and privilege of the landed aristocrat. Instead, however, of juxtaposing one
pictorial style against another, which would make this point aesthetically, Ray
shoots both the commercial upstart and the ageing zamindar not just in one-point
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Figure 38.
Thornton Freeland, Flying Down to Rio (1933)

Figure 39.
Yma Sumac

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Figure 40.
Fernando Birri, Los inundados (1961)

Figure 41.
Satyajit Ray, Jalsāghar (1958)

perspective, but in deep focus, which accentuates the perspectiva artificialis to a

maximum degree, even when what we hear on the soundtrack is an Indian rāga or
the songs of Rabindranath Thakur (Figure 41).
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What are we to make of this gesture, then? Is this a Western representation of a

chapter drawn from colonial Bengali history which remains complicit with the
ideological oversight of the British Rāj? Or—produced on the tenth anniversary of
Indian Independence—does Jalsāghar repeat at the level of cinematic form the
content of its diegesis—that is, does the one-point perspective that Ray highlights
in the apparatus signal the ultimate victory of Western imperialism over modern
Bhārat, even in her newly-won political and cultural freedom? In the undecid-
ability of this question, Jalsāghar thus plays out dialectically Panofsky’s
observation that one-point perspective both constitutes ‘a triumph of the
distancing and objectifying of the real, and [at the same time] a triumph of
the distance-denying human struggle for control’. ‘A serious filmmaker’, Ray told
the American Film Institute in 1978, ‘always expresses a point of view … This is
involvement but it does not preclude objectivity.’30 Setting a well-known close-up
from Devi (1960) alongside a characteristic shot from Sikkim (1971) shows that
Ray could use the cinematic apparatus ornamentally ‘in arabesque’ to work
against its own ideological grain, though this was not an option that he frequently
pursued (Figures 42 and 43). What is more, Ray’s clear disinclination to lay bare
the workings of the cinematic apparatus—hence his deeply ambivalent reflections
on Antonioni and Godard31—combined with his predisposition for metonymical
cinematic devices serves to convince the spectator that this subject position, this
point of oversight, is ‘right’, is ‘real’, is ultimately ‘true’. While the content of his
oeuvre as a whole raises serious questions about colonial and contemporary
Bengal, formally his films tend more often than not systematically to reinforce the
visual regime of British and American imperialism, which effectively suspends
the residual tension between the thematics of the films and the rhetorical mode of
their presentation (Vorstellung) in perpetual irresolution.
To expose this occidentalism, we can turn briefly—by way of a conclusion—to
the work of two contemporary filmmakers, both from thoroughly colonized
cultural contexts, whose films—in ways that turn out to be closely related—
attempt to reorient the ideological baggage of the Western cinematic apparatus
in the name of a postcolonial cinema that refuses the diegetic, pictorial, and
subjective investments of European and American film. I refer to: Abbās
Kiārostamī (‫ )ﻋﺒﺎﺱ ﮐﯿﺎﺭﺳﳣﯽ‬and Wong Kar Wai (王家衛). In part, their work
marks a general shift from a metonymic to a metaphorically oriented cinema,
which accordingly necessitates the deconstruction of classical narrative coherence.
In this context, however, we will have to content ourselves with several images at
best. In Abbās Kiārostamī’s minimalist Ta m-e gīlās (‘The Taste of Cherry’
[1997]), a middle-aged man intending to commit suicide later that day drives
around Tehrān attempting to find someone who will bury his body the morning
after. Given that the three men whom he interviews for this venture are a Kūrdish
soldier, an Afganī seminarian, and an Azerī taxidermist, it is not difficult to read
the film as an allegory of the self-immolation of contemporary Īrān, laid to rest by
representatives of the peoples whom Persia had formerly colonized and the
Islamic Republic still continues to colonize today. To convey this sense of
claustrophobia and confinement, moreover, Kiārostamī has shot the film not only
so that at virtually all moments the image frustrates the depth of one-
point perspective, thereby effectively undermining its ideological entailments
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 DANIEL L SELDEN

Figure 42.
Satyajit Ray, Devi (1960)

Figure 43.
Satyajit Ray, Sikkim (1971)

(Figures 44 and 45). At the same time, Kiārostamī draws on indigenous forms of
Īrānian art, such as Safavid miniatures or Pārsī calligraphy, in order to reframe the
subjectivity of the spectator through the resources of Īrānian aesthetics (Figures 46
and 47). On the one hand, Kiārostamī’s style allows the spectator to focus on the
beauties of the superficie and the evidence of the senses such that, as Jean-Luc
Nancy puts it, the film constitutes a captation rather than an agency of cooptation.

[T]he image is always closer or further away than anything that could fix a ‘point of
view’—and it is therefore not possible for the spectator of the film to identify with a
certain point of view: it is a true model of what [Bertolt] Brecht called distanciation,
and that names nothing but the essence of the spectacle insofar as the spectacle is
nothing ‘spectacular’ … only the gaze as carrying forward, forgetting of the self, or
rather: (de)monstration that there will never have been a self (soi) fixed in a position

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 ‘OUR FILMS, THEIR FILMS’

Figure 44.
Abbās Kiārostamī, Ta m-e gīlās (1997)

Figure 45.
Abbās Kiārostamī, Ta m-e gīlās (1997)

of spectator, because a subject is never but the acute and tenuous point of a forward
movement that precedes itself indefinitely. The subject has no project, it does not lead
what is called a quest (there is no grail here, not because there would be nothing to
hope for, but because hope is something else than a draft drawn on a future that can
be expected, hence imagined): to the contrary, hope is confidence in the image as that
which precedes, always.32

The only thing that Nancy omits to mention here is the degree to which this
Brechtian distanciation derives from the film’s continual foiling of one-point
perspective. As Kiārostamī visualizes it, then, Īrān’s larger political and cultural
predicament emerges through the dialectical negation of Western imperialism—
thereby corroborating the story that Abu ’l-Qāsim Ferdowsī has to tell in the latter
half of the Shāhnāmeh.33
In an equally complex intertextual manoeuvre, Wong Kar Wai’s 2008 re-release
of Dōng Xié Xī Dú (東邪西毒, ‘Eastern Menace, Western Poison’ [English: Ashes
of Time Redux]) constitutes a highly self-conscious adaptation of an adaptation. In
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 DANIEL L SELDEN

Figure 46.
Abbās Kiārostamī, Ta m-e gīlās (1997)

Figure 47.
Mehrān Rōh ōnī—Persian Nastal īq
˙
1994 Wong had filmed Jin Yong’s well-known martial arts novel Shè diāo yīng
xióng zhuàn (射鵰英雄傳 [‘Legend of the Condor Heroes’], 1958) which even at
that time already circulated in two versions. Regarding the gradual deconstruction
of the diegesis, Hong Kong critic Paul Fonoroff already called the original release
‘an exquisite photo album masquerading as a motion picture … [where] in the
end, it is images … that linger in the mind far longer than any coherent
impression of the movie as a whole’ (Figures 48 and 49).34 Fourteen years later,
Wong Kar Wai re-mastered and re-edited the entire film, saturating its colour
palette to an even higher degree than the originals and turning what was an
already extremely elliptical narrative into a series of diegetic shards, thereby

410
 ‘OUR FILMS, THEIR FILMS’

Figure 48.
Wong Kar Wai, Ashes of Time Redux (2008)

Figure 49.
Wong Kar Wai, Ashes of Time Redux (2008)

rendering the film, particularly in its intertextual layerings, something of a

labyrinth through which—not unlike David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001)—
the spectator can no longer find his or her way: even the gender of Wong’s
characters in Redux remains unstable. Chris Doyle’s cinematography, moreover,
flattens virtually every image in the film to the farthest possible degree so that,
rather than realizing Dürer’s ideal of pictorial Durchsehen,35 the shots look more
like a combination of Helen Frankenthaler’s or Kenneth Noland’s colour-field
compositions,36 where everything that happens, happens on the surface of the
picture plane, crossed with Palm Springs ‘mid-century modern’ design.37 As
David Bordwell notes:38

Redux is a total rethink … The most pervasive change has involved the color
tonalities. The 35mm prints of Ashes I’ve seen have favored a vivid orange-brown
palette, with strong blues (sky and water), red accents, and very little green. The video

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 DANIEL L SELDEN

copies vary, but the most commonly available DVD version is notably more russet and
lower contrast than the 35mm. Interiors have lost most of their hard-edged chiaroscuro
and become softer and paler. Exteriors, and some interiors, have been keyed toward a
hard yellow. The vivid browns and oranges have gone a bit gray, and the blacks verge
on green … By adding fairly consistent tints and by softening certain sequences, Wong
has given the film greater tonal consistency. Further, he has upped the artificiality of
the film’s look, creating a neutral ground against which certain colors, such as the wan
face and ruby lips of the Woman, stand out even more vividly … I like to think that by
recasting his film so markedly, Wong has brought his masterpiece back under his
control. In this sense, his changes remind me of Stravinsky’s reorchestration of
Petrushka and other early ballets. Stravinsky rewrote the scores in order to win
performance rights, but he also brought his latest thinking to the task. In the same way,
Wong has made Ashes of Time new all over again—available to many more viewers
now and hereafter. This daring, fourteen-year-old exercise in avant-pop moviemaking
is miles ahead of nearly everything on view right now.

Much of the cutting in Redux proceeds not by metonymic logic, but by way of what
Eizenštein called ‘tonal montage’,39 in which texture or colour combination—as in
a Josef Albers or a Mark Rothko painting—has become the primary consideration.
Though clearly situated in such traditional Hong Kong cinematic genres as wŭxiá
and huángméixì, Ashes of Time Redux clearly constitutes both a displaced allegory
of the contemporary situation of Hong Kong, suspended between ‘Eastern menace
and Western poison’, as well as a sublation of the dialectic that Ray called ‘our
films, their films’. Ultimately, what both Kiārostamī and Wong Kar Wai ‘make us
see’—in D W Griffith’s understanding of that cinematic mission—are the global
conditions of late capitalism which, though always anchored in the local, has
produced a world that has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible to fully
comprehend. What emerges here is a demystified cinema that, with considerable
political edge, not only abandons the outworn protocols of the neo-imperialist
scopic drive, but introduces a new visual regime that, as Susan Sontag predicted
half a century ago, has moved from a hermeneutics of art to an erotics
(Figure 50).40

Figure 50.
Abbās Kiārostamī, Bād mā rā xāhad bord (1999)
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 ‘OUR FILMS, THEIR FILMS’

Notes on Contributor
Daniel L. Selden is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent book is
Hieroglyphic Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Literature of the Middle Kingdom (Berkeley,
2013). This essay forms part of a larger project entitled Allegory of the Image.

Notes
1
S Ray, Our Films, Their Films, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1976.
2
K Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray, Berkeley: University of California Press,
2010, p 155.
3
Cf P de Man, ‘Kant and Schiller’, in A Warminski (ed), Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996, pp 129–162.
4
See, A. Warburg, Werke in einem Band, Frankfuhrt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2010.
5
On the connection of metonymy to realism, see R Jakobson, On Language, L Waugh (ed), Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University press, 1995, pp 15–33.
6
S Ganguly, Satyajit Ray, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Incorporated, 2007, p 79.
7
J Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre I, 1953–54, Paris: Éditions Points, 1998, p 61.
8
R Barthes, ‘L’effet de réel’, Communications 11, 1968, pp 84–89.
9
S Ray, Interviews, B Cardullo (ed), Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007, pp 85 and 18.
10
S Ray, ‘The Question of Reality’ [1969], in S Ray (ed), Satyajit Ray on Cinema, New York, NY: Colombia
University Press, 2011.
11
B Sarkar, The World of Satyajit Ray, UBS Publishers Distributors, 1992, p 73.
12
A Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol 1, H Gray (ed), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968, pp 14
and 20.
13
See further, D Andrew, What Cinema Is! Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
14
C Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma, vol 1, Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1971.
15
J Wilson, ‘Film Literacy in Africa’, Canadian Communications 1(4), 1961, pp 7–14.
16
B Balázs, Theory of the Film, London: Dennis Dobson Ltd, 1932, p 35.
17
On suture, see K Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, Oxford University Press, 1984, ch 5.
18
E Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol 2, Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1923–1929, pp 107–108.
19
A Manetti, Filippo Brunellesco, H Holtzinger (ed), Stuttgart, 1887, p 9. For further discussion, see
M Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988, pp 124–128.
20
E Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, C Wood (trans), New York: Zone Books, 1991, pp 30–31.
21
E Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, New York: Zone Books, p 72. L Kuleshov, Iskusstvo Kino: Moi
opyt, Moscow: Teakinopechiat, 1929.
22
See S Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, Routledge, 2006, pp 25–26. The following discussion
closely follows her summary of the material.
23
P Rosen (ed), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, Columbia University Press, 1986, pp 291–292.
24
M Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, London, 1869; E M Forster, A Passage to India, London, 1924. See further,
E Walberg, Postmodern Imperialisms: Geopolitics of the Great Games, Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, Inc., 2011.
25
J K Howat, Frederic Church, 2nd edn, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. S Anderson, Lawrence
in Arabia, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.
26
S Ray, Interviews, p 124.
27
See above.
28
Cf D Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
29
F Birri, ‘Cinema and Underdevelopment’, in M Chanon (ed), Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American
Cinema, London: Channel Four Television, 1983, p 12.
30
S Ray, On Cinema, Sandip Ray (ed), New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, pp 99–106.
31
See, for example, S Ray, On Cinema, Sandip Ray (ed), New York: Columbia University Press, 2013,
pp 99–106.
32
J-L Nancy, L’Évidence du Film, Brussels: Yves Gevaert Editeur, 2001, pp 67–78. Cited in H Ford, ‘Driving
into the Void’, www.academia.edu/1493247/Driving_into_the_Void_Kiarostamis_Taste_of_Cherry (accessed
29 June 2014).
33
See D Selden, ‘Iskander and the Idea of Iran’, in T Whitmarsh (ed), The Romance between East and West,
Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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34
P Fonoroff, South China Morning Post, 23 September 1994.
35
See above.
36
See C Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, vol 4, Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1993.
37
See A Coquele, Palm Springs Style, Assouline Publishing, 2006; D Faibyshev, Palm Springs Mid-Century
Modern, Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 2010.
38
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2008/12/18/ashes-to-ashes-redux/ (accessed 29 June 2014).
39
S Eisenstein, Selected Writings, 3 vols, R Taylor (ed), London: I. B. Tauris, 2010, 1:19 et passim.
40
S Sontag, Against Interpretation, New York: Picador, 1961.

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