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CINEMAS OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH
This book engages with the idea of the Global South through cinema as a
concept of resistance; as a space of decolonialisation; and as an arena of vir-
tuality, creativity and change. It opens up a dialogue amongst scholars and
filmmakers from the Global South: India, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, South
Africa, and Egypt.
The essays in the volume approach cinema as an intertwined process of
both production and perception not divorced from the economic, social,
political and cultural. They emphasise film as a visual medium where form,
structure and content are not separable. Through a wide array of film-readings,
the authors explore the concept of a southern cinematic esthetics, in particu-
lar, and the concept of the Global South in general.
The volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of film
and media studies, critical theory, cultural studies and Global South studies.
Dilip M Menon is Professor of History and International Relations at the

University of Witwatersrand, and Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in
Africa. His interests are in knowledge from the Global South, South Asian
cultural and intellectual history and oceanic histories. He has edited Changing
Theory: Concepts from the Global South (2022) and Cosmopolitan Cultures
and Oceanic Thought (2023).
Amir Taha gained his PhD in English Literature and Cultures from the
University of Tübingen in 2017. He is an Associate Researcher at Centre for
Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), University of the Witwatersrand, South
Africa. Taha taught Film Studies, Cultural Studies and Global South Studies
at the University of Tübingen and at Wits University. He is the author of Film
and Counterculture in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising (2021) and is the co-edi-
tor of the upcoming Cinemas from the Global South. Towards Southern
Aesthetics (Routledge).
CINEMAS OF THE GLOBAL
SOUTH
Towards a Southern Aesthetics
Edited by Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

Designed cover image: Cover Illustration: Adéle Prins,
www.prinsdesign.co.za
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
The views and opinions expressed in this book are those of author and
do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Routledge.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-15916-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-72747-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-42183-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
CONTENTS
Lists of Figures vii

List of Contributors x
Preface and Acknowledgements xii
1 Cinemas of the Global South: Towards

A Southern Aesthetics 1
Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha
2 Southern Aesthetics: The Egyptian Way: Shady

Abdelsalam’s The Day of Counting the Years (1969) 23
Amir Taha
3 Constellations of Time: Towards a Cartography of

Plundered Memories 45
Diego Granja do Amaral
4 Singing in Saffron Times: Documentary Film and

Resistance to Majoritarian Politics in India 72
Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar
5 Local Realism: Indian Independent Film as a

Socio-political Medium 107
Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram
vi Contents
6 Indian Gangsters, American Noir and Africa’s Drum

Magazine: The Making of a South African Gangster
Fliek during Early Apartheid 130
Damon Heatlie
7 Contagious Aesthetics: Bios, Politics and Cinema in

Contemporary Kerala 157
Veena Hariharan
8 Dealing with The Precarious City: Violence, Memory

and Rhythms of Endurance in La sombra del
caminante (Ciro Guerra 2005) & La sociedad del
semáforo (Ruben Mendoza, 2010) 180
Luis F. Rosero Amaya
9 Cinematics of Southern Environmentalism 204

A. Chukwudumebi Obute
Index 226
FIGURES
2.1 Opening credits 26

2.2 The ancient Egyptian text 27
2.3 Wide shot of Maspero reading the script 27
2.4 Introduction of Ahmad Effendi completing the passage 28
2.5 Introduction of Maspero 28
2.6 The spatial separation between the brother and the elders 33
2.7 Close-up of the brother 33
2.8 Wanis watching and listening to the revelation of the family
secret: visual expression of Wanis’s entrapment 33
2.9 Wanis’s POV. In the progression of the conflict, Wanis’s
brother is now occupying the left half of the frame 34
2.10 Wanis standing in the narrow stairs revealing a sense of him
being trapped 34
2.11 The elder cuts out the Mummy 39
2.12 Reaction shot: Wanis’s shock 40
2.13 The Eye of Horus at the centre of the frame 40
2.14 Wanis after running from the cave and alone on the top of
the mountain 40
3.1 Sunken ship (02:07) 52
3.2 Old lady amidst ruins (04:08) 53
3.3 Debris of Palestinian architecture (04:42) 54
3.4 Running water (03:25) 55
3.5 Women’s march (06:08) 57
3.6 Rissas Studio (06:25) 57
viii Figures
3.7 Displaced Palestinians (15:19) 60

3.8 Palestinian resistance (00:15:44) 61
3.9 Palestinian Cinema institution logo (00:16:48) 62
3.10 Cultural Arts Section (CAS) building in Beirut. Credit:
Shlomo Arad 64
3.11 Palestinian protester (21:29–21:30) 66
3.12 Explosion in Beirut, Lebanon (19:14) 67
3.13 Convoy of Palestinian refugees (23:04) 68
4.1 The Oath 77
4.2 RSS street march 78
4.3 Kali salutes 79
4.4 Intertitles 79
4.5 Kali 84
4.6 (a) River Sarayu; (b) Monkey and the Dome 86
4.7 Tea shop 87
4.8 Tea shop discussions 88
4.9 Man with a cell phone 90
4.10 WhatsApp Forward 91
4.11 Two Benches 95
6.1 ‘The Globe Gang’, Drum, July 1956. A dramatic exposé on
a feared ‘coloured’ gang from Cape Town in the 1950s 132
6.2 ‘The Malay Mob’, Drum, October 1964. A gang from
Fietas in Johannesburg that openly challenged Sherief
Khan’s gang for control of illicit activities in the 1960 136
6.3 ‘Township toughs thrash Gangat’, Drum, March 1964.
Gangat was allegedly involved in extortion 144
6.4 ‘The “Cop-Proof” Gangster’, Drum, July 1956. Gang
supremo Khan was known to be in cahoots with the police 151
7.1 Body bags piling up at the hospital: Screen Grab from Virus
(2019) 167
7.2 Closeups frame the makeshift hospital: Screen Grab from
Virus 167
7.3 Index Patient Catherine in Contagion (2011): Screen Grab
from the film. 168
7.4 Index Patient Zackariya in Virus: Screen Grab from the film. 170
7.5 Index Patient Zackariya photographing a fallen baby bat in
Virus: Screen Grab from the film 171
9.1 Establishing shot of the Niger Delta (Black November,
00:00:59) 207
9.2 Establishing shot of Los Angeles (Black November,
00:01:27) 208
9.3 Aerial wide shot of Bhopal (Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain,
00:02:27) 209
Figures ix
9.4 Scene of a leaking pipeline (Black November, 00:14:31) 216

9.5 Resistant Niger Delta Group Bomb Oil Installation of
Western Oil (Black November: 00:55:39) 220
9.6 MIC Leakage, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, 00:01:07 222
9.7 Unnamed journalist investigating Union Carbide (Bhopal:
A Prayer for Rain: 00:20:03) 223
9.8 The Voice of Bhopal (Bhopal A Prayer for Rain: 00:32:28) 224
CONTRIBUTORS
Diego Granja do Amaral is a postdoctoral fellow in the Postgraduate Program

in Communications at Universidade Federal de Sergipe (UFS) in Brazil. He
holds a PhD in Global South Studies from the University of Tübingen and a
PhD in Communications from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). His
doctoral thesis, “Resistance Time: An Atlas of Conflicted Temporalities”,
was honoured with the Excellence Prize by Universidade Federal Fluminense
(UFF). His research interests encompass visual culture, memory, film, nec-
ropolitics, temporalities, postcoloniality and the Global South.
Luis F. Rosero Amaya is PhD candidate at the University of Tübingen

(research programme “Entangled Temporalities in the Global South”). His
dissertation is entitled “Becoming Subject in the City: Urban Temporalities in
the Contemporary Cinemas of Argentina, Brazil and Colombia”. In this
ongoing research and other publications, he focuses on the intersections
between media, aesthetics and culture. He holds a BA in Humanities
(University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), MA in Literature & Cultural Theory
(University of Tübingen) and was visiting researcher at the University of
Cambridge.
Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram is Senior Lecturer in World Cinema at

Queen Mary University of London. He is author of India’s New Independent
Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid (Routledge, 2016), Indian Cinema beyond
Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution (Routledge, 2018)
and Indian Indies: A Guide to New Independent Indian Cinema (with a
foreword by Shabana Azmi) (Routledge, 2022) – the world’s first mono-
graph, edited anthology and condensed guide on new Indian Indie films.
Contributors xi
Ashvin is Associate Director of the UK Asian Film Festival–London and has

directed the UK Heritage Lottery-funded documentary Movies, Memories,
Magic (2018).
Veena Hariharan is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of

Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her essays and articles on
documentary, non-fiction cinema and the environment have appeared in
anthologies and journals. She is currently Alexander Von Humboldt Fellow
at Goethe University, Frankfurt, where she is working on her project on
non-human-human entanglements in cinema and new media.
Damon Heatlie is a Senior Lecturer at Wits Film and Television at the

University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). He has also taught at the Universities
of Cape Town, the Western Cape, and Transkei. He has guest lectured at
Arcada University (Helsinki) and Valand Academy (University of Gothenburg).
He has an MA in Literary Studies (cum laude) from the University of Cape
Town, an MBA from the Wits Business School, and a PhD undertaken at
Wits and the University of East Anglia. His doctoral thesis comprised a fea-
ture film screenplay and research on South African Indian gangsters during
early apartheid. His current research focuses on screenwriting practices and
the South African film industry.
Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar are retired Professors, School of Media
and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Their docu-
mentary films, which have been screened across the world, have won 33 national
and international awards, including the Basil Wright Prize 2013 for So Heddan
So Hoddan (Like Here Like There, 2011), at the Royal Anthropological Institute
Film Festival, UK. Their publications include A Fly in the Curry: Independent
Documentary Film in India, Sage, 2016, which has won a Special Mention for
the best book on cinema in the Indian National Film Awards, 2016.
A. Chukwudumebi Obute is Assistant Professor of English at the University

of Tübingen, and currently a visiting scholar to the University of Maryland.
He completed his doctoral programme at the University of Tübingen in 2022,
and his dissertation explored the nexus between the Niger and the Mississippi
delta regions of Nigeria and America respectively from slavery to the envi-
ronmental ruins of petrocapitalism. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the
Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen,
and also worked as a visiting lecturer at the University of Rostock. His
research interests include environmental humanities, African American liter-
atures and cultures, postcolonialism, cultures of extractive capitalism, and
the Global South. He is the co-editor of the volume Mediascapes of Ruined
Geographies in the Global South (2023).
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) was founded in 2010 with
funding from The Andrew W Mellon Foundation to engage with histories
and knowledge from the Global South. Apart from funding master’s and PhD
fellowships, CISA organized a number of workshop and conferences on
questions such as thinking theory from Africa, capitalism, concepts from the
Global South, the question of expulsions and xenophobia, and cinemas of
the Global South. The conferences were conceptualized by postdoctoral fel-
lows attached to the Centre because of generous funding from the University
of Witwatersrand’s Research Office.
This conference was conceptualized by Amir Taha and generously funded
by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS), Johannesburg. Ntombifuthi Buthelezi,
the Administrative Officer at CISA, handled the administration of the fund-
ing and organizing the logistics of the conference with aplomb. Jörn-Jan
Leidecker, the bureau head of RLS, was enthusiastic about the project and
very generous with his time for discussions, and in arranging for funding.
Nyakunu Tafadzwa, the RLS, helped negotiate the funding bureaucracy with
alacrity and charm. The Wits School of Arts was generous in providing us
with the space for the conference and arranging for the technical require-
ments. Adele Prins and Givan Lotz designed the brilliant poster, as they have
done for all our events and conferences. Adele is singular in her ability to
create just the right image after hours of conversation about the ideas moti-
vating a conference. We would like to thank The Bioscope (then at Maboneng
and now located in Milpark) for allowing us use of their space for screenings
of films.
1
CINEMAS OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH
Towards a Southern Aesthetics
Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha
It appears to be a truism that different spaces have different visual aesthetics

inflected by culture, history, and environment. At the same time, this appears
to be too empirical an answer, given the artifice of cinema and its relation to
an idea of reality. As Deleuze points out, the two times of history and cinema
cannot be mapped one on to the other; at best, they occasionally intersect.
This draws us into discussions of the immanence of form and formal con-
struction of the visual image, taking us away from ways of thinking that
make direct connections between cinema and the nation, or to particular
historical conjuncture (post-Soviet cinema, post-revolution Iranian cinema,
post-colonial cinema), and so on. The problem remains of how one is to
relate aesthetics and historical or sociological location; to pay attention to
form while at the same time not arguing for the absolute autonomy of the
visual image. We are aware that images are never invented ex nihilo but exist
within a history of global circulation of imaginings from art, cinema, reli-
gious iconography, literature, and metaphors of nature. This allows for the
experience of resonance and of rhyming with multiple locations; Hollywood
is at the same time strange as well as familiar to Asian and African audiences:
the recognizable phenomenon of quotation, repetition, and plagiarism that
are the features of popular cinema, whether Nigerian, Hindi or American.
These features also help create a common global visual aesthetic that allows
the distinction between genres – comedy, action, sci-fi – so central to popular
cinema. These are some of the questions that inflect the discussion that fol-
lows on thinking about an aesthetics of cinema from the global south.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832-1
2 Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha
Cinematic Aesthetics in General

What is cinema? This question is as old as cinema itself. The question “what
is …?” is, too, as ancient as the history of thought. In the context of this
volume, it seems that to avoid this question entirely might be a shortcoming.
The urge to define cinema may lead to a similar kind of lacuna, as in the
attempts of scholars of the last century, which has led for the most part to a
process of stratification and of rigid categorization. Modernists such as
Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot gave us their beloved hierarchal categoriza-
tion of high culture, low culture, and popular culture. This was also applied
to cinema. According to James Monaco, there exist three notions when we
talk about cinema. First, film as the overall medium: cinematic films, televi-
sion, amateur footage, news, ads, films, and the like. Second, movies: the
commercial side of film such as Hollywood narrative cinema, blockbusters
and the studio system. In other words, the term movies is linked to the
American theatres: “we are going to the movies”. It is entertainment, pop-
corn and box office receipts. Third, cinema: the artistic dimension of film
(Monaco 2011). Now, if we are to apply this division to the modernist idea:
movies circulate in the realm of low and popular culture while cinema is high
culture. Monaco adds that within film, a further division has been created:
narrative commercial cinema and art-cinema (Monaco 2011).
We are a group of scholars from the Global South, another manifestation
of the earlier classification of the Third World; probably a fading “trend” in
academia. How we understand the term Global South may vary, but one thing
we do have in common: we “southerners” are scattered over the globe, and
each in their milieu is embarking on a process of knowledge production within
which an entangled movement is taking place. Most of us are trained in a
Western/Eurocentric paradigm, some of us are filmmakers too; yet all of us are
rooted in and bring in “southern” histories, subjective experiences, traditions,
and perspectives. In other words, we form an assemblage within a larger
assemblage: the Global South. In producing this volume, we attempt to pres-
ent yet another assemblage which explores the notion of southern aesthetics.
From a southern perspective, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, the
militant intellectuals and filmmakers who wrote the groundbreaking text
Towards Third Cinema (1970), call the narrative, commercial Hollywood
model first cinema. They defined it as that in which “man is accepted only as
a passive and consuming object; rather than having his ability to make his-
tory recognized, he is only permitted to read history, contemplate it, listen to
it, undergo it.” It is a “spectacle aimed at a digesting object” (1970). The
viewer is a consumer of ideology, not a creator of ideology. Art-cinema for
Solanas and Getino is called second cinema. The second cinema often thema-
tizes the situation of disaffected colonial subjects who can neither posit nor
effect a social basis of transformation, caught up as they are in the ideology
Cinemas of the Global South 3
of bourgeois individualism. It thus remains closer to forms of existence but is

not yet revolutionary (Solanas and Getino 1970). The two authors then
coined the term Third Cinema, which sets out to fight “the system,” and sees
itself as a weapon in a collective struggle against racist, capitalist domination.
It is defined as a cinema of liberation. It understands the collective character
not only of history making but of historically individuated subjects (Solanas
and Getino 1970). They see Third Cinema as an act of inserting the work as
an original fact in the process of liberation, placing it first at the service of life
itself, ahead of art. They appeal for dissolving aesthetics in the life of society;
quoting Frantz Fanon they say only in this way “can decolonisation become
possible, and culture, cinema, and beauty – at least, what is of greatest impor-
tance to us – become our culture, our films, and our sense of beauty” (Solanas
and Getino 1970).
Building on the notion of Third Cinema, we would like to focus on the
question of aesthetics. However, we remain skeptical about divisions; the
northern division of commercial versus art-cinema, and the second division by
Solanas and Getino of first, second, and third cinemas. We would rather elab-
orate a concept of southern aesthetics. This is not to be understood as rejecting
what Solanas and Getino appealed for, basically a cinema of decolonialization.
On the contrary. Our main concern is to depart from the question of what is
cinema in favour of the question of what does cinema do: to move from ontol-
ogy to praxis. Moreover, if we create a rigid division among cinemas, we will
face, first, the problem of aesthetics as in saying: all chronological and causal
narratives are necessarily commercial, hierarchical, and even colonial. Second,
such a division is in itself hierarchical: first, second and Third Cinemas.
However, we do understand that at the historic moment (the 1960s) at which
Solanas and Getino wrote their texts, such a notion was necessary and valid.
Let us not forget that the very term, the Global South, was developed from the
term Third World after all. Our argument is that the medium of film is heter-
ogeneous. In most commercial and spectacular films, we can also see the
so-called art-cinema aesthetics. Taking Spielberg’s films as an example, he uti-
lizes the technique of one-take/long-take in all of his films, the very same tech-
nique used by Italian neo-realism, which is considered as art-cinema. The
shot-reverse-shot technique created and employed by Hollywood can be seen
in many art-films. Even a straightforward chronological narrative may be used
in so-called art-films; take Bela Tar’s The Turin Horse (2011) as an example.
In this sense, what is crucial here is what does aesthetics do and how.
When Solanas and Getino say that by dissolving aesthetics in the life of
society, decolonialization becomes possible, allowing us to talk of “our cul-
ture, our films, and our sense of beauty” (1970), we do agree, but we would
also add that the question of aesthetics is neither an abstract nor a borrowed
element. Aesthetics are created, discovered, rediscovered, mutated, circulate,
and are sometimes bent. The notion of revolutionary cinema seen by the
authors as a process of decolonialization must be examined in the light of the

twenty-first century in which the concept of revolution itself needs to be
re-examined and redefined. Thus, in discussing a concept of southern aesthet-
ics, we argue that we can build upon the spirit of Solanas and Getino’s idea
of resistance and decolonialization, but we should also add the following
notions: virtuality, creativity, entanglement, and affect. All these notions, we
argue, are intertwined with one another. In other words, we shall go north
again, and pick a concept: bend it, mutate it, and re-assign it – the concept of
assemblage coined by Deleuze and Guattari (2005) and further developed by
Manuel De Landa (2006). We argue that Southern aesthetics is one creative
assemblage within a larger assemblage called the Global South. In Cinema 2
(1985), Deleuze argued that “the linkage between film and the viewer’s
thoughts is the shockwave or the nervous vibration which means we can no
longer say ‘I see, I hear,’ but I FEEL’” (1986). The image is the pre-thought,
or rather the unthought.
The Deleuzian understanding of cinema is very useful because it includes
the notion of affect as the main force of cinema. Also, it deals with the viewer
and his relationship to the image as organic and non-separable. The notion
of the image as pre-thought is itself an element of resistance; so is the concept
of affect which the image creates. For the largest part, up until this very
moment, academia has dealt with cinema in terms of thoughts. Still for many
scholars, subjective experience is a dead end which one cannot examine
objectively. We believe that we, as academics of the south, can deal with
cinema not only as professional readers/viewers, but also as audience. Non-
professional viewers enjoy cinema; so do we. There can be no shame in
enjoying Marvel films, despite Scorsese’s opinion that they are not cinema. In
Egypt, one used to like Hindi films with a duration of four hours not because
a shot or frame revealed the imaginarium of an Indian identity. Rather, one
felt something and both laughed at as well as was thrilled by Amitabh
Bachchan’s ability to destroy a whole crowd of villains. One had fun with it.
So, southern aesthetics are in both modes: production and perception. It con-
stitutes a resistance against the hierarchy of tastes, appropriation of genre,
and arguably, even against the modernist notion of art.
Various definitions of the term Global South have been offered: is the word
“south” to be written with a lower case or upper case ‘s’? The geographical
or the conceptual? One of the answers to this question is found in Vijay
Prashad’s The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
(2014). He argues that the Global South’s objective in the twenty-first cen-
tury is the dismantling of the neoliberal project. Moreover, Prashad engages
in a historiographical process through which he tells the story of the effects
of neoliberalism from a southern perspective. He offers another narrative of
the rise and dominance of neoliberalism whose starting point was the 1970s’
“enforced” debt crisis (2014). Here, Prashad’s historiography is a clear
example of a narrative with southern characteristics: to move from ontology

to praxis by engaging in an act of history-writing. Telling the tale from a
southern perspective is not just an alternative history to the North-centric
narrative of neoliberalism. It is also not just an act of resistance to a history
written now by a northern critical eye, as in David Harvey’s A Brief History
of Neoliberalism (2007). Rather, the southern act of writing history, whether
concerning neoliberalism or in general, is concerned with creating new types
of realities both actual and virtual.
Menon (2018) has argued that the idea of the Global South is an invitation
to imagine the world afresh. In many ways, the twentieth century was, to
borrow Lauren Berlant’s plangent phrase, one of “cruel optimism” (Berlant
2011) when something one desires is actually an obstacle to one’s flourishing.
The nation-state, imagined in opposition to colonial power and projecting
the future citizen against the subject, was visualized as an emancipatory pro-
gram. Instead it incarcerated, marginalized, and dispossessed its constituents
at the same time. He suggests that we think about the Global South as an
ongoing project, a conceptual and experiential category that is not a mere
geographical agglomeration, that is, Asia+Africa+Latin America+Caribbean:
a reframing of the decolonized world. It insists on a recognition of ongoing
relations of coloniality (to echo Mignolo 2011), whether they be political,
economic, or epistemological. Following from this, we need to address the
aesthetic production from these spaces, and not have the persistent return, or
staying with a theoretical framing from within a Euro-American episteme of
the last three centuries (Menon 2018).
Against this backdrop, we understand the Global South as follows, as an
assemblage of deterritorialization and decolonialization. In actuality, it is an
assemblage of virtuality, creativity, and affect. An assemblage is horizontal
and non-hierarchical. It consists of lines entangled in one another which are
in a constant process of forming and re-forming and escaping the state’s task
of capture, control, and re-appropriation. The Global South is an assemblage
of virtuality. The virtual is the horizon of potentiality, “of not yet, but poten-
tially actualized actuality” (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 99). The Global
South is also a virtuality of affect. Affect, according to Brian Massumi (2015)
is “a process of affecting and being affected which is to be open to the world,
to be active in it and be patient for its return activity. This openness is also
taken as primary. It is the cutting edge of change. It is through it that things-
in-the-making cut their transformational teeth” (ix). The artistic sensibility
of the Global South exists within the larger southern assemblage. Thus,
southern aesthetics are defined by
1 A process of decolonization and deterritorialization

2 Resistance
3 Affect
To talk about southern aesthetics, we cannot avoid the historical context of

cinema, for the history of cinema itself is concurrent with the history of south-
ern cinema. Let us discuss the three aspects of southern aesthetics with the
example of Egyptian cinema. Cinema arrived in Africa, Asia, and South America
as soon as it was born. For example, the Lumiere Brothers screened their work
in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1896. The same year also witnessed the screening of
Lumiere’s work in India and South Africa. One year later, Brazil screened the
first film as well, and in 1898, the country produced its first film. In Nigeria, a
few years later, in 1903, the first screening of a film took place (Shafik 2003). In
other words, cinema in the geographical south is as old as cinema itself, mean-
ing both modes of production and of perception. Soon enough these countries
started to produce their own films. Here, we have the first aspect of the assem-
blage: a process of decolonialization and deterritorialization.
Thinking Visual Aesthetics from Egypt

In the case of Egypt, starting from 1896, and up until 1924, film production
was rich and vivid; the production companies were all Western until the year
1924. However, the two pioneers of Egyptian cinema, Mohammed Karim
and Mohammed Bayoumi, both worked intensively in this era. The former
was the first Egyptian both to appear in and direct films; the latter shot,
directed, and produced up to eleven films. Bayoumi founded the first Egyptian
production company in 1924 – Amon Films. Karim went to Berlin to study
cinema and worked as an assistant to director Fritz Lang. When he came
back to Egypt, he launched his cinema career together with Bayoumi, and
both worked with various nationalities: Italian, French, German, Greek,
Armenian, Lebanese, and Syrian. Here we see that a process of decolonializa-
tion had been already in the making. These two pioneers invaded the world
of cinema in Egypt, which was dominated by the French, the Italians, and the
Germans. Soon enough they started to make their own films and created a
space for Egyptians to enter this world.
This leads to the second aspect of southern aesthetics: resistance. Cinema
in Egypt turned rapidly into an artistic assemblage of resistance in the sense
that Egyptian filmmakers started to gradually break the European monopoly
of cinema production both financially and artistically. It is also important to
put this era into its historical context, for the British occupation of Egypt
started in the year 1882. The year 1919 witnessed a revolution against the
British and their puppet ruler, King Fouad. This resulted in the nominal rec-
ognition of Egypt as an independent state by the British in 1922; however,
they remained as a de facto power on Egyptian soil. In 1923 the Egyptians
drafted their first constitution, which made Egypt a parliamentary democ-
racy. From 1923 up until 1952, the sociopolitical arena in Egypt was a bat-
tleground among the nationalist political parties on the one hand and the
British and the royal court on the other. Cinema along with other arts, such
as music, literature, and fine arts, was a part of this struggle with the focus on
the complete independence of Egypt from the British and at times from the
Monarchy. No wonder that the first Egyptian cinema production company
was established by Mohammed Bayoumi in 1924 and launched its produc-
tion by filming the return from exile of Saad Zaghloul – the Egyptian national
leader who initiated the 1919 revolution and who was exiled by the British
to Malta. Bayoumi produced a series of films during that time, one of them
being Brasoum Is Looking for a Job (1924), which is the first feature silent
short produced in the whole of Africa; a social comedy of two unemployed
Egyptians fighting hunger and trying to find work. This film is the first wholly
Egyptian production, written, shot, and edited by Bayoumi. This thir-
teen-minute film is entirely shot on location in real streets and alleys.
Now, we have the third aspect: creativity. In 1927, the first Egyptian full-
length silent film, Leyla, directed by Widad Orfi, was produced by the newly
establish Misr Studio, followed in 1932 by the first Egyptian talkie, Awlad Al
Zawat (High Class Society) directed by the Egyptian cinematic pioneer
Mohamed Karim. The establishment of Misr Studio in 1935 as an Egyptian
holding company was political in nature. It was established by Talat Harb, an
Egyptian economist visionary who participated in the revolution of 1919. By
1935, Misr Studio was the foremost and the largest production company in
Egypt, Africa, the Arab world, and the entire Middle East. Harb sought to
create an Egyptian national cinema.
The most important production of Misr Studio was Kamal Selim’s Al
Azima: The Will in 1939, characterized by George Sodoul, the French film
historian, as one of the most important films in cinema history. Sodoul argues
that The Will predated Italian neorealism, and he even drew a comparison
between Selim’s film and De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief. Being a long feature
film, it was the first Egyptian film to go out of the studios, and to deviate
from the mainstream genres at the time: love stories, musicals, and upper-
class settings. It portrays the life of the Egyptian working class and their
struggle against the class of the Pashas. Like Bayoumi’s Barsoum Looking for
a Job, Selim tells his story in the Egyptian alleys: in real life locations with
many nonprofessional actors as extras. For the first time, an Egyptian talkie
presented a portrait of realist subject matter, setting, and form. Al Azima’s
importance also lies in its resistance and subversion on both levels: content
and form. The subject matter deals with a young, educated man from the
working class struggling against classism, bourgeois corruption, and the tyr-
anny of capital to lead a dignified life. In terms of form, as mentioned before,
the film creates a form of Egyptian realism through which it uses the alley as
a space that is representative of Egyptian life, and it employs a cinematic
language of realist imagery, such as the use of long takes, stable camera
movement, and deep focus.
Western scholars of cinema cite a number of films predating Italian neore-

alism as having been great influences on this movement. David Bordwell
(1988) argues that the great Japanese filmmaker Ozu Yasujiro’s An Inn in
Tokyo (1935) was one of these films. Ozu is the only non-Western filmmaker
who is cited as influencing Italian neorealism by almost every Western scholar.
Here, we would add Kamal Selim along with Brazil’s Humberto Mauro’s
Argila (1940), India’s Shantaram (Duniya Na Mane 1937) and Mexico’s Fred
Zinnemann and Emilio Muriel (Redes 1936) along with Ozu to the list of
non-European filmmakers whose realist films predated Italian neorealism
both aesthetically and in terms of content.
The examples we mentioned show that these cinemas were able to form
their own visions and their own languages in a process of deterritorialization
and decolonialization. The creative process that filmmakers such as Kamal
Selim, Mauro, and Shantaram had been engaged in sought to mutate and
transform the cinematic knowledge they gained from the colonizers into new
languages and techniques. The content of Selim’s films is by no means sepa-
rated from their creative form and style; for example, a wide shot of the alley
showing the small details in deep focus, the slow panning and tilting camera
movements introducing the characters in their environment, and the compo-
sition of the frames to create a visual meaning. Kamal Selim’s Al Azima estab-
lished a cinematic motif which runs through Egyptian realist cinema: the
alley. The alley is also Nagib Mahfouz’s main literary cosmos in his middle
phase (the Cairo trilogy Ben El Qasreen, Qasr Al Shawq, and Al Sukkariyya;
and the novels Midaaq Alley and The Sons of Our Alley). The alley in Al
Azima, and afterwards in Egyptian cinema, specifically the works of Salah
Abu Seif (the forerunner of second-generation realist cinema) became an
Egyptian subgenre within the realist genre. The alley as a spatial unit; an
intensive space in which various characters live and interact with one another
represents in many realist films the Egyptian society and sometimes even
Egypt as such.
Moreover, the notion of resistance is evident when we examine Selim’s,
Mauro’s, and Shantaram’s films: first, the social dimension of the story and
second, the creation of a new genre, which runs counter to the then existing
popular genres. While the dominant genres at the time whether in India,
Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt were musicals, comedies, and romance, these film-
makers wanted to access and present the social realities of their societies. In
doing so, this aesthetic was to reach a wider audience in these countries who
made cinema into a popular art, a cultural practice, and even a tool of com-
munal life by building provisional cinemas and touring talkies. Now it is
worth asking about affect, which is the third aspect of Southern aesthetics.
Let us be viewers for a moment and visualize the Egyptian audience watching
Al Azima in 1939. Let us imagine how these images affected them, what they
felt, specifically the working-class audience, known as the TERZO.1 Let us
go a step further and ask about non-Egyptian audiences, not the colonizers,
but our audiences: in India, in Mexico, in Brazil, in Nigeria at the time. What
about a viewing of this film in 2019 with all the filmic memory that we have?
When thinking about these questions, keywords like amusement, fascination,
fun, empathy, compassion, history, historiography, knowledge, relating
come to mind. We could add more, but above all, affect.
An Indian Aesthetics of Cinema?

To move to another space, we would like to think with some formulations
about the possibility of a distinct Indian aesthetics whether in art or commer-
cial cinema, keeping with the themes of deterritorialization, resistance, and
creativity. That said, one could equally argue that all art-cinema is alike,
while commercial cinema is different, each in its own way. The director as
auteur creates a visually literate space that makes evident both the continuity
with global cinema as well as the break, through elaborating an individual
aesthetics. For instance, the Indian new wave director Kumar Shahani, who
understudied Robert Bresson, manifested many of the formal elements of a
Bressonian aesthetics while making very “Indian” films in terms of plot and
content, whether Maya Darpan (1972) or Char Adhyaya (1997). The ques-
tion whether Indian art-cinema managed to generate a distinct Indian aes-
thetic is a complicated one. That they portrayed an Indian reality goes
without saying whether we are talking about Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, or
Ritwik Ghatak. However, the more difficult question to answer is whether
there was there a visual aesthetic that drew upon Indian theories of viewing,
audience, or staging? In the case of Yasujiro Ozu, David Bordwell, among
others, has argued for a very Japanese aesthetics of setting and staging a shot
(Bordwell, 1988).
There has been little work done on Indian art-cinema for us to draw any
firm conclusions, but two elements that have received attention in popular
cinema have been the idea of darshan and that of melodrama. Ashish
Rajadhyaksha has argued that the viewing of the cinema star as hero/heroine
possessed of powers of affect bears a strong relation to the way in which
Indian devotees perceive their gods, which resonated with anthropological
works on the place of viewing in Hinduism (Eck, 1981). To have a darshan
or affective viewing of God, and being viewed in turn, in the temple is com-
parable to the experience of seeing stars on the screen in a darkened theatre
(Rajadhyaksha, 1987). S.V. Srinivas has extended this idea to explore the
phenomenon of fan clubs in southern India, in which young men create nodes
suffused with affect, devotion, and respect around popular film stars in Tamil
and Kannada film (Srinivas, 2009, 2013). Ravi Vasudevan has characterized
the world of Hindi cinema as characterized by the melodramatic imagination
with an excess of sentimentality and tropes of heroic abnegation (Vasudevan,
2010). Though Hindi cinema of a particular era did resonate with the Douglas
Sirk melodramas of Hollywood, the range of plots and characters and the
resistance to consistency of register – films are comedies, tragedies, and sat-
ires rolled into one – make it difficult to characterize Hindi cinema by the
classic rules of genre.
Just as Srinivas has argued for a politics of devotion that hinges on an
aesthetic of excess – the hero as divine – Ashis Nandy has argued that there
is an affective synergy between artifact and audience. Hindi films in his opin-
ion reflect the slum’s eye view of the world, drawing on the hopes, dreams,
and illusions of those marginalized in society (Nandy, 1998). This was par-
ticularly true when he wrote in the 1990s, when the superstar Amitabh
Bachhan was at the apogee of his career playing the angry, idealistic subal-
tern. Economic liberalization, the expansion of the economy, and the phe-
nomenon of the wealthy non-resident Indian was to change the tenor of
Hindi films. What is significant in all of these formulations is the search for
something distinctive about Hindi cinema in terms of its making and viewer-
ship. It could be argued that Ravi Vasudevan is closest to the mark when he
argues for the presence of melodrama as a trope which could partially explain
the popularity of Hindi cinema across Asia, Africa, and at one time, the
Soviet Union. The presentation of values of sacrifice, heroism, family honour,
and so on had a broad appeal to both those who sought tradition, as well as
those who espoused traditional values. However, the question remains: given
the circulation of an international aesthetic, how distinctly “southern” was
the cinematic aesthetic of Indian cinema.
While there were directors and films that engaged with themes of mid-
dle-class life (albeit through the tropes of love and family), this parallel cin-
ema remained largely within the paradigm of Hindi cinema. There were
tighter and less improbable plots, more down to earth dialogues, music and
lyrics of greater literary quality, but these were aimed at the same audience
who were looking for something different. Whether the films of Basu
Chatterjee and Basu Bhattacharya (done outside of the big studio frame-
work) or southern films remade for a Hindi speaking audience by Dasari
Narayana Rao or B Nagi Reddi (from the studios of Andhra Pradesh and
Tamil Nadu), they were reluctant to break the mould. It was in the 1970s
that the National Film Development Corporation began funding avant-garde
and offbeat films in Hindi as much as regional languages. Gita Kapur has
remarked on the irony of a state sponsored avant-garde in her contention of
a compromised modernity in India (Kapur, 2000). These films, of which
Shyam Benegal became the exemplar, dealt with the question of India’s unat-
tained modernity and its social problems ranging from feudalism in the vil-
lages to questions of caste and gender. There was very little formal innovation,
and it could be argued that the deep commitment to social change in itself
was the hallmark of the new aesthetic (Prasad, 2001).
The Apu Trilogy of Satyajit Ray between 1955 and 1959 marked a depar-
ture in terms of style and substance. Influenced as he was by European cin-
ema, and his early association with Jean Renoir, he made a departure in his
time by taking Bengali film out of the studio as well as working with unknown
actors whom he then framed within his distinctive vision. Over time he
brought in stalwarts of the Bengali film industry, but it was difficult to imagine
Ray’s actors outside of his refined aesthetic. Ray as an auteur was all perva-
sive – screenwriter, music director, and cinematographer – with every scene
carefully hand drawn before it was picturized (Robinson, 2022; Ray, 2016).
The gritty rural realism of the Apu trilogy was matched by his later evoca-
tions of the claustrophobia and anxieties of middle-class life in films like
Pratidwandi (1970), Jana Aranya (1971), and Seemabaddha (1976). There
was a distinctive look and feel to the deceptive simplicity of his narration. It
was an aesthetic governed by space – interiors suffused by conventionality; by
affect – emotions held in check and revealed by gesture and inflection; and by
music – composed by Ray in a remarkable hybrid of Indian classical, folk,
and European tones. It was also the apotheosis of the new Indian middle
classes, caught between the values of the gentry and the new modern.
Bengali cinema found a voice in Ray and his brilliant contemporary Ritwik
Ghatak – who distilled the experience of the Partition of Bengal and made
loss the affect that governed his aesthetic – and subsequently a galaxy of
filmmakers from Mrinal Sen to Buddhadeb Dasgupta. A distinctly cosmopol-
itan aesthetic emerged, characterized by a rootedness in Bengali culture and
an easy familiarity with world cinema and its idioms. The French New Wave
and its experiments with the artifice of cinema found an echo. In southern
India, the works of the maverick directors John Abraham (his classic film on
a donkey in a brahmin village riffing on Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthasar) and
G. Aravindan (cartoonist and government employee) expressed an aesthetic
uncompromising in its commitment to visuality and the sonicscape of the
film. They drew upon untrained actors in order to move away from notions
of glamour and beauty that characterized popular cinema at the time.
Aravindan in particular subordinated the pace of his films to the temporality
of south Indian classical music and his films as well as the early films of
Adoor Gopalakrishnan have a reverie-like quality. Time in these films was
dilatory and personal, and viewers were required to subordinate their pre-
conceptions about the pace of cinema when they entered the hall. Arguably,
there was a distinct politics of time being articulated here, of a rural stucked-
ness, as it were, at one level and the transcendental interiority of classical
music at another. However, we have little writing on the aesthetics of Indian
art-cinema to go on and these are but initial thoughts.
In these diverse instances, there was an attempt to delineate a particular
aesthetics that was both visual and temporal. In Gopalakrishnan and
Aravindan, the emphasis on the ordinariness, even anonymity of the
protagonists, was a break from the cult of personality in popular cinema. In

terms of narration, they abandoned linearity for immersion; one moved
through time rather than images or plot. Characters were subordinated to the
dilatory temporality of the visual; the protagonist on the landscape was no
more important than the features of the landscape or the occasional move-
ments of the clouds or wind. It was not about timelessness but timefulness;
one lived in time; waiting and expectation were part of the business of living.
The use of music exalted this viscous sense of time. In classical Indian music,
the musician determines the temporality of the rendition of a raag or song,
and the expertise and skill lie in the multitude of variations on a theme. This
sense of repetition with variation could be said to encapsulate the experience
of being in the rural and semi-urban spaces of India before liberalization
collapsed distinctions and accelerated movement. This was a distinct aesthet-
ics of a moment: of the emergence of an idea of modern India. While Ray and
Benegal were concerned with a depiction of spaces, social history, and char-
acters, the southern directors sculpted with time.
The last two decades have seen an increasing engagement with a diversity
of themes moving away from the classic divide between rural and urban and
summoning up the anomie of the small town. The small towns have become
the way stations on the road to the modern, and what Ashvin Devasundaram
has called the “indies” or independent filmmakers have drawn upon the vio-
lence, frustration, and enterprise of these spaces (Devasundaram, 2016). This
new gritty aesthetic represented by filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap and
Vishal Bharadwaj draws upon the idea of singular and distinctive characters
in a variety of landscapes in northern India. In addition, the films play with a
soundtrack that draws upon both folk as well as globally inflected rhythms.
The exemplar of this was in the music by Amit Trivedi in Dev D (2009) a riff
on a film classic, which drew its sounds from house, rap, wedding bands, and
folk songs. There is a deliberate engagement here with the idea of a new
aesthetic of a hybrid modern which marks a break from the invented urban
village of popular Hindi cinema. Both in terms of theme as well as music and
characters, the indies try to create a different and new visuality of an emer-
gent Global South. This is important as the sense of global connectedness is
at the same time mediated through characters who are aware that while glo-
bality is the aspiration, their lives remain accented by the local.
The emergence of an aesthetics that rhymes with the larger spaces of the
imagined Global South under the sign of a globality in which all do not par-
ticipate equally has been one of the major departures in popular cinema.
With the demise of the great auteurs, a new generation of directors commit-
ted to arthouse is yet to emerge. The spread of over-the-top media services
(OTT) and internet services has also meant, paradoxically, the need for a
distinctive Indian cinema that performs globality in terms of production val-
ues, realist acting, and an accelerated temporality that engages audience
affect. There have been two routes of engagement. The first, has been literally
over-the-top productions like Bahubali I and II (2015, 2017) and more
recently RRR (2022), that are technologically driven and strive at a
Hollywood fantasy aesthetic. The second, following on from Aravindan and
Adoor, has made Malayalam cinema one of the most aesthetically innovative
film industries. There is an urgent engagement with the present – of life medi-
ated by cell phones and internet; the dangers of viral epidemics; and the
continuing imbalance of gender roles. There is an exigent commitment to the
local; a surprise hit like The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) reprises Henrik
Ibsen’s Nora through the story of a woman subordinated to her role as wife
labouring in the household, who finally ups and leaves the patriarchal jail of
her home. The Malayalam film draws upon dialect, small lives, and the swirl-
ing issues of the present to forge a new aesthetic that redefines the space of
popular cinema.
An Aesthetics from the Global South?

Thinking an aesthetics from the Global South necessarily engages with the
questions of location and provenance, but also issues of circulation, referen-
tiality, and ironic quotation. The question of resistance manifests itself in the
search for authenticity – of plot, character, and location – as much as style –
vernacular and rooted styles of dialogue and music that depart from a
national aesthetic to engage with rhythms and sounds from the Global South.
Affect is central in the relation to particular histories, where emotion is polit-
icised as a marker of history, as evidenced in the essays in the volume on
Colombia (Amaya), Palestine (Amaral), or India (Jayasankar-Monteiro).
There is no univocal adherence to an idea of the Global South here; each
essay articulates a particular landscape of provisional engagement. There is a
productive tension between the idea of the global that is implicated in contin-
uing relations of imperial power and global capitalism (Obute) and local
forms of aesthetic production that engage with ideas of translation and tran-
screation that are resistant (Heatlie and Hariharan). Central to the works
discussed here is the subjective artifice, conceit, or aspiration of articulating
a cinematic vision from a space (Taha, Devasundaram). As Taha points out,
seeing cinema as an assemblage of production, distribution, viewership as
much as directorial vision, plot, dialogue, and aurality allows us to think a
particular aesthetics within a larger landscape of imbrications of objective
circumstances of global capital and politics, as much as subjective percep-
tions of self and aspiration.
One of the key founding moments for Taha’s elaboration of a film aesthetics
from Egypt is the breaking away of Egyptian filmmakers from the monopoly
of European cinema production and the setting up of their own studios and
film production companies. This act of decolonization and resistance speaks to
a third element in his argument of the generation of a distinct affect governed

by location and engagement with local history. The essay focuses on Shady
Abdelsalam’s The Day of Counting the Years (1969), a film from the age of a
mature Egyptian cinema which creates a distinct Egyptian visual aesthetic,
from the use of dress and costume to the use of hieroglyphics as well as the use
of high Arabic in keeping with the recollection of a history past. In particular,
the deliberate focus on the eyes of the protagonist, Wanis, as he surveys mon-
uments recalls the symbology of the eye in Egyptian mythology related to
health, protection, and restoration. The film is set in the early twentieth cen-
tury context of the trade in pharaonic monuments and the pillaging of arte-
facts. A global imperial discourse locates the Egyptian past as a scarce resource
subject to plunder by avaricious locals; the film itself is a counter to the actual
history, a recuperation of a utopian possible moment of Egyptian agency as
heroic. Central to the film is the effort of an Egyptian archaeologist (as opposed
to a European one in “real history”), and a heroic young Egyptian who goes
against his family and tribe in order to enact the preservation and iconization
of the pyramids and the history of ancient Egypt in the present. The film raises
the resonant question of what the work of memory after colonialism is, to be
haunted both by the idea of resurrection as well as bad faith. On another
register, Abdelsalam, having worked with European directors like Joseph
Mankiewicz and Roberto Rossellini, creates his own vision inflected by the
circulation of the forms of a global cinema. His insistence on Egyptian finances
for Egyptian cinema, which delays the making of the film, and curtails the
production of another on account of his death, is reflective of a politics of
resistance that runs like a vein through the idea of a cinema from the Global
South. As Taha puts it, there is a poignant search for a “mode of historiogra-
phy which is not concerned with the hegemonic”; a lack of concern that does
not ignore but sets aside and thinks beyond. Central to the essay is the plan-
gent question of a re-creation of a past, an artifice that believes that the past
just as the future can be remade from the present: what does the engagement
with Pharaonic Egypt mean for a modern decolonized sensibility?
Two essays take up the documentary form in which the engagement with
history and the present is more immediate and purposive, as is the idea of
restoration, in both the senses of preservation as well as justice. Diego
Amaral’s essay works its way through the documentary Looted and Hidden
(2017) and the stories told by its four protagonists. The film works with the
after histories of the Israeli Defence Force’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and
the raiding and almost destruction of the archives Cultural Arts Section of
the Palestinians in exile. This is a particular story of the Global South in
which “imperial durabilities” (Stoler 2016) persist and colonialism is an
ongoing story and “speaking from the south” is an attempt to rethink a his-
tory of the present through fragments and debris to write about a stateless
people in an era of nation-states. Photographs and images become a
necessary “supplement” and witness to a history of the destruction of forms

of archives as well as lives. What Amaral calls poetically the curatorship of
the “fugacious image” generates a constellation of perceptions in which the
spectator has to constitute the film through the assemblage in the film. There
is no pure authorship here; the director, the camera, the spectator reconsti-
tute a partial and ever vanishing set of images and memories. But there is also
a utopian play on time, a turning back to a past which is the cinematic pres-
ent, when there was the co-presence of Israel and Palestine; though a time
still marked by demolition, rubble, and debris. Amidst this very dispersed
story of exile, trauma, and resistance there is also the appeal to the Third
Cinema of the 1970s. The political struggle informed by a southern aesthetics
remembers and connects with the liberation movements of Cuba, Algeria,
and their contribution to Palestinian cinema; creating what Amaral calls a
“decolonial aesthetics.” If the narrative of the film is premised not on fullness
but a fragmentary archive, an effect enhanced through the contrasting, yet
complementary, narrations of the four interviewees, there is an understand-
ing that this is the nature of life in a majority of the Global South. Amaral
summons up Benjamin’s idea of looking at the stars and the reading of dispa-
rate, non contiguous entities which are nevertheless held together at the
moment of viewing – the zeitmoment. History is left “up in the air” but not
in an irresolute manner; it is up in the air that history becomes visible for a
recuperation through a conscious act of viewing and restoration. The politics
of an otherwise with regard to the ineluctability of power and its effects
marks this essay as much as Taha’s earlier one, speaking to what could be
seen as the image of hopeful monsters: those that have the potential to estab-
lish a new evolutionary lineage. An aesthetic of hope, of the future, of earlier
imaginings of futures, as much as the presence of futures past inform the
aesthetic of this film and articulate a particular position from the Global
South: a visual holding together of past, present, and future in the moment.
As Kundera famously observed, history is about the struggle between
remembering and forgetting, given arbitrary states and regimes of censor-
ship. The control of meaning is also about generating a structured forgetting
of histories of resistance. This has become an exigent issue in contemporary
India with the rise of Hindu majoritarianism and a politics of authoritarian
governance. In many senses, the latter feature has become a feature not only
of politics in the Global South – India, Brazil, China – but also in countries
in Eastern Europe – Hungary, Poland. Given the draconian restrictions on
free speech and artistic production in India, Anjali Monteiro, and K.P.
Jayasankar argue pace Brecht that there will always be singing, particularly
in dark times. The idea of resistance to global empire goes alongside opposi-
tion to postcolonial governments invested in the idea of the sovereignty of the
nation-state, as against the people. Of course, as the authors argue, there is
no singular aesthetic of the Global South, but there is a perception of a
common condition that generates conversations and the circulation of forms

of imagining. The essay discusses two documentary films separated in time
by a few decades but engaging with the same phenomenon – the vitiation of
the public sphere in India by a politics of division and hatred. A detailed
engagement with a branch of the Hindu rightwing organization, the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, involves letting the members tell their stories as they go
about the daily rituals of affirmation and indoctrination. The director does
not intervene, nor does he censor; counter to the practices of the state, he
allows the protagonists their say. It is this clear portrayal of a sensibility of
animosity that disguises the art of filmmaking: an aesthetics of judicious
selection that presents itself as the ‘real’. The lack of censorship draws atten-
tion to the censorship that surrounds the citizen in everyday life, particularly
those who are of a dissenting temperament. The second documentary picks
up the threads of a quotidian politics not through an institution or party but
through an engagement with conversations around a tea stall; that resonant
marker of the public sphere in India. It weaves in demotic language peppered
with the scatological and engages with the insurgent subaltern engagement
with an emergent public sphere marked by the intimacies of the face-to-face
alongside the face-to-screen. The deliberate construction of the regimes of
post-truth is mediated through everyday conversation, social media, and the
intimate violence of relations governed by friction as much as sociability. The
visual and sonic aesthetic of the films discussed here points to a distinct phe-
nomenon of the Global South, the construction of a contingent sociability
through words that connect bodies, in violence, argument, and amiable
insult. The essay records the emergence of a particular ethic of visuality: of
singing/seeing/hearing in dark times that is marked by the dissent of observa-
tion and the observation of dissent. It looks at the demotic working out of
politics in the everyday and visualises it as a distinct aesthetic of the Global
South where both democracy and dissent are works in progress.
Ashvin Devasundaram engages with the reigning paradigm of a specifi-
cally Indian visual aesthetic that is conflated with “Bollywood” which then
becomes the national cinema form. “Bollywood” (more accurately Hindi
cinema, if we are not to succumb to Hollywood as the paradigm of popular
cinema) is one of the many film industries in India and occupies both an
antagonistic as much as symbiotic relation with films in regional languages
ranging from Telugu and Tamil to Marathi and Malayalam. Each of these
cinemas has a distinct visual and sociological aesthetic, inflected by regional
uniqueness as much as borrowings and citations of global cinema as well as
films in Hindi. Devasundaram also points to the transcultural flows of the
present – Netflix and other platforms – that move us away from a search for
indigenous theories and ways of viewing; a particular affect rooted in an
“Indian” sensibility as it were. He looks at the working-out of the indie aes-
thetic – the visual register of independent films – that works out an
“antithetical” imagination that runs counter to the hegemony of Hindi pop-

ular cinema as much as an emergent political paradigm that purveys Hindu
majoritarianism in the public sphere. As with the previous essay, there is a
conscious working out of a counter-politics but this time in the realm of
popular feature films. The indies present a “plural, pragmatic and alternative
paradigm” of subaltern protagonists and their precarious lives, projecting a
“local realism”. Alongside the national history of the emergence of parallel
cinema, the indies also share in the assumptions and visuality of Third
Cinema – the interweaving of the local and the global that makes up the
distinct aesthetics of the Global South. There is a telling of “Indian” life here
but ranging from the home to the world, from the kitchen to stories of indi-
vidual and territorial insurgencies. A comprehensive landscape is delineated
in which patriarchy, for example is eviscerated – through satirical representa-
tions of the violence of bourgeois domesticity; a questioning of heterosexual
norms that undergird Hindu nationalism; and looking at life in spaces that
resist the territorial violence of the Indian state in spaces such as Kashmir. In
the current atmosphere of febrile religious nationalism, the films discussed in
this essay take up religion as patriarchal ideology, but also explore the man-
agement of religion in everyday life as an alternative imagination of self and
community. This is parallel cinema, both in its invocation of earlier cinematic
histories, but also in constituting a parallel imagination that invokes the apo-
rias of a postcolonial (and not yet) landscape.
The question of resistance runs like a vein through the essays, as exem-
plary of the politics of the Global South, where an equitable and democratic
politics is always a work in progress. As Damon Heatlie points out in his
essay on the 1940s Hollywood gangster films and the everyday life of the
South African Indian under apartheid, reflecting on a southern aesthetic may
take the form of invoking “guerrilla practice” or a delineation of “local gran-
ularity”. Heatlie steps out of the screen and studies the construction of a local
sartorial aesthetic among South African Indians modeled on the style of
American gangsters in the Hollywood imagination. While the films them-
selves were morality tales – crime does not pay – for a population subject to
racial hierarchization, gangster style embodied an antiestablishment aesthet-
ics of being that allowed for a visual performance of insubordination. It is
this suppleness of adaptation by the not-so-passive consumers of cinema that
points to both imagination and movement as features of a southern sensibil-
ity, in Heatlie’s words. When we consider the aesthetics of the cinema of the
Global South, Heatlie reminds us that we need to look at the effects of cin-
ema, the question that we raise in the Introduction of what does cinema do?
With well-cut suits, combination shoes, and brilliantined hair, South African
Indians in the 1940s and 1950s performed an “aesthetics of unruliness”, of a
disobedience that appropriated Hollywood into a very local history. Heatlie
points to the fascinating fact of how the vicinity of cinema halls in Durban
themselves became the sites of violence and the locales of gang war; it was
almost as if life imitated art with a vengeance. The language of gangster
Hollywood came to be appropriated by local Indian gang members giving
them an argot of virility and detachment as also of drama to speak about
their exploits in contravention of apartheid law: scofflaws against white law.
The landscape of viewing included Hollywood as well as the melodramatic
ethically infused films coming in from India; Afro-Asian affinities played a
role too in the making of disobedient selves. An ethics of community and
obligation was knit into the gangster performative creating a distinct South
African Indian viewing mode that moved from screen to bodies. Heatlie
raises the important question of not only production but of the reasons and
manner of consumption of cinematic effect in enacting resistance. Moreover,
he looks at viewing in a global scape, where both Hollywood and Hindi
cinema work on the imagination to generate unintended effects and strange
hybrids of performance among viewers.
Veena Hariharan in her study of a Malayalam film stays within the realm
of popular cinema while looking at an antithetical imagination that
Devasundaram would contend is the feature of the indies. In a film that eerily
presages the COVID-19 pandemic, Virus (2019), looks at the origin and
spread of the Nipah virus in the state of Kerala through the interwoven sto-
ries of migrants, nurses, and doctors as also the concatenation of humans and
animals that generated new viruses and the dangerous porosity of bodies to
illness. The visuality of the film is inflected by global cinema, but in its central
ethic, the plot of the film is governed by the ethical behaviour of doctors and
the unremitting responsibility of government towards those under its protec-
tion – a utopian vision of pastoral care that is distinctly of the Global South
in its provenance. Virus draws upon the visual scape of the Mexican director
Inarritu’s Babel, which brought to Hollywood the dispersed narratives,
microstories, windowing, and dynamic camera that sought to capture the
fragmentation of life in the Global South. It also works with the global yet
locally inflected worlds of social media and the cyber public and the ever
present threats of hacker praxis. Given that China and India lead in the use
of social media, the film works with the co-presence, mediation, and intersec-
tion of multiple media giving a sense of the pace and disjunctured nature of
identity and lives in the Global South. Hariharan frontally engages with the
questions of borrowing, adaptation, quotation, and plagiarism which char-
acterize the circulation and dispersion of cinema in the world. While Virus
draws upon Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion (2011), which worked with
the spread of a deadly virus from China to the rest of the world, as Hariharan
points out, it is the dissimilarities that are remarkable for engaging with a
distinctly Global South point of view. Virus moves away from the racialized
geography of the American film as also the moral indictment of the main
protagonists, whose sexual peccadilloes are in part responsible for the rapid-
ity of the transmission. It instead draws upon the idea of a fragile dependence
of humans and animals, and the normalcy of unthinking behaviour, a belief

in human actions that have unintended consequences. There is a greater com-
passion towards humans caught up in something that they do not compre-
hend, as also a sensitive portrayal of those handling crises that are new and
unexpected leading to tragedies beyond anyone’s control. Here again, we
return to both the questions of resistance as much as affect; we are asked as
viewers to identify with those who become unintentional carriers of the virus.
Hariharan moves deftly between the interiority of the film and the circum-
stances of its making pointing to the democratic low cost and digitized pro-
duction ethic of the “newgen” films in general. Making do with what is
available (a characteristic of post-2011 Egyptian cinema as well in Taha’s
study [2020]), a workmanlike and practical Global South aesthetic under-
girds this production where the ambition of the film is not connected to the
vastness of the budget.
The last two essays deal with the question of violence and everyday lives
in the Global South bringing in some of the empirical realities of a space
characterized by the persistence of colonial damage, the operations of neoco-
lonial capital, as well as the developmental violence practiced by postcolonial
elites. Luis Amaya thinks through the imprint of seven decades of urban
violence in Colombia on the subaltern body and the experience of a distinct
temporality – time without “a horizon of expectations” or fixed referents –
that lies athwart the time of the national. The two films discussed here,
directed by Ciro Guerra and Ruben Mendoza, deal with precarious lives and
their experience of time with all its tempos of acceleration, waiting, emer-
gency, and uncertainty so that cinematic time is mapped on to the temporal-
ity of lived lives. Given the shifting horizons of temporality, the present
cannot be perceived rationally as a succession of moments; it acquires a
dreamlike quality. Guerra’s Wanderer’s Shadow (2004) works also with the
idea of disability as a metaphor; the two central characters are bound by the
fragility of their bodies as much as haunted by the violence that connects
them to each other. Visually, the film draws ironically upon tropes from the
Western, the premise of irrational violence being counterpointed by the
infructuous masculinity of the protagonists. Ruben’s Stoplight Society (2010)
too works with the stuck temporalities of those who panhandle at the traffic
lights and the attempts of Raul to work with the time of the transition from
red to green; that brief moment when cars and beggars are brought into
relation. There is a resistance to continuity, and to verisimilitude and discon-
tinuity reigns as a thread. These films are the delineation of a particular aes-
thetics, rooted in history and the present, of urban life as experienced by
those who are at the margins of narratives of modernity and the nation.
Violence is a constant penumbral presence, and it is this premise that inflects
the discontinuities of the visual as much as the lack of wholeness in the lives
of the characters. Exemplary of the rhythms of life in “our parts of the
world,” the experience of temporality in Guerra’s and Ruben’s films is a
concatenation of cinematic and real times; time is made visual. Here too,
there is a gesture of affiliation with the histories of Third Cinema, and to
other landscapes inflected by the dreams and detritus of modernity. The clash
and interdependence between objects, bodies, and scapes happens within a
space of perennial waiting; the only certainty is the punctuality of violence.
The final essay takes us beyond the space of the cinema and its visualiza-
tion to the exigent question of the environment and its devastation in an era
that we have now come to call the Anthropocene, with the caveat that the
destruction of nature was not practiced equally by all humans (hence the
proliferation of qualifiers like the Capitalocene or indeed, climate
Caucasianism). How is cinema to visualize environmental disaster and what
does it mean when we speak of the aesthetics of a violent and ugly phenom-
enon? Slums, in Anthony Obute’s sharp characterization, have become the
“apparition” through which we can think of the imbricated nature of the
global north and south. Working through the idea of Afro-Asian connections
and affinities, Obute reflects on the filiations between Indian and Nigerian
cinema in thinking about what are termed naively as environmental acci-
dents. He juxtaposes two films; one on the exploitation of the Niger Delta for
oil that renders humans and nature as mere detritus, and the other on the
Bhopal gas tragedy, when the intransigent irresponsibility of Union Carbide
led a leak of deadly methyl isocyanate from the plant and destroyed lives.
This is a cinematic invocation of the “necropolitics” that constantly haunts
the aesthetics of the Global South, where slums, oilfields, and chemical plants
become the synecdoche for the callousness of a postcolonial modernity.
Cinema yet again becomes an enactment of a decolonial aesthetics through
the enactment of resistance as a persistent trope within what Obute terms the
“Indo-Nigerian cinematic space”. This speaks not only to the circulation of
forms of visualization and thematics between “Nollywood” and “Bollywood”
but also to governmental endorsement of international legal conventions for
the protection of natural and human environments. Here again, we see that
a cinematic aesthetics of the Global South is rooted in actual political and
experiential filiations across Africa, Asia, and South America that generate
the imagery of a common predicament. Obute, like the other authors in this
volume, insists on the persistent and intransigent engagement of cinema with
the real and the constant elision of cinematic and historical time.
Note
1 TERZO stands for the third item in Italian. The word was used in Egypt in
describing the back of the orchestra seats (the hall) audience, mostly standing
spots for the cheapest price. In the viewing traditions in Egyptian cinemas, the
Terzo audience were working-class. They were the most interactive audience. If
the Terzo liked the film, they would cheer and clap, if not, they would boo and
chant asking for their money back.
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2
SOUTHERN AESTHETICS
The Egyptian Way: Shady Abdelsalam’s The Day of
Counting the Years (1969)
Amir Taha
Shady Abdelsalam’s The Day of Counting the Years (1969) is a leap from
classical Egyptian realism to a short-lived unique style of cinema. Being the
only long feature of film of Shady Abdelsalam, this film had opened up a new
horizon of Egyptian cinematic aesthetics. This film, I argue, is an example of
what could have been a starting point for a then new line of creativity, a vir-
tuality of sorts. However, Shady Abelsalam passed away before being able to
make another long feature. His second film would have been Ikhnaton. I claim
that The Day of Counting the Years represents, as does Al Azima (Selim,
1939), what we can call a southern aesthetics. Abdelsalam Salam’s film is
based on real events. In 1881 the tribe of Horabat had been investigated for
illegal trade in pharaonic monuments. The villagers of al Quarna in Upper
Egypt had discovered more than fifty royal mummies of the Twenty-first
Dynasty. Over generations, the tribe had been systematically pillaging archae-
ological booty, and treasures from the tombs began appearing on the world’s
antiquities markets. The film tells the story of Wanis, the son of the Horabat
leader in the mountain village of Qurna who discovers after his father’s death
the secret of the royal mummies and his family trade in pharaonic monu-
ments. Wanis is conflicted about this secret, and the film portrays this inner
conflict as well as his conflict with his family.
In terms of the story, Abdelsalam engages in a process of historiography in
which he re-appropriates history and even rewrites it. The Day of Counting
the Years deviates from the true story in which the sons of the tribal leader
had been the biggest monument traders in Egypt. The film portrays the two
brothers refusing to engage in such business. The older son is killed by the
tribe’s elders and the younger son, Wanis, ends up informing the authorities
about the royal mummies. The Egyptologist who arrives at the mountain to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003421832-2
24 Amir Taha
investigate the matter is an Egyptian. In reality, it was the German Egyptologist

Emil Brugsch, as there were no Egyptian archaeologists or Egyptologists at
the time. Abdelsalam chose to give the role of Maspero, the famous French
Egyptologist, to an Egyptian actor speaking in high Arabic. This can be seen
as a sort of counter to Western cinema which at that time, and partly until
now, gives the roles of Arab characters to Western actors. Maspero, though,
appears only at the opening of the film. The world we travel into is that of the
mountain, its people, and its memory.
The film connects Egypt’s forgotten past to its present. Ancient Egyptian
history and culture is completely unknown to most Egyptians. The film also
links ancient Egypt to the film’s tribal present in the village of Quarna and to
the urban culture of Cairo represented by the Egyptian Egyptologist. This film
is the only Egyptian film which visually and conceptually engages with
pharaonic Egypt. This film is about memory discovered – by those who
unknowingly live in it yet are out of it, and even divorced from it. Formally, the
film chooses to present its dialogue in high Arabic instead of a demotic Egyptian.
This creates both an effect and an affect of alienation and mystique. In terms of
production, Abdelsalam was the first Egyptian auteur; he wrote, did the art
production, and directed the film. Abdelsalam was also a fine-artist; he drew
each frame of each scene in a visual storyboard. The rhythm of the film is slow
and subtle, and the image is the main vehicle, not the action nor the movement.
It is a distant, almost a foreign world of mystery, secrets and the ancient dead:
a world of various pasts. But it is also a world so real and so close in its poverty
and its psychology, a world of urgent presents. In the following, I shall discuss
two scenes from the film in relation to the notion of southern aesthetics.
Shady Abdelsalam: An Unfinished Greatness

Analyzing this film, the first and last feature of Shady Abdelsalam, one cannot
avoid the visual aesthetics. Abdelsalam was a fine-artist, painter, sculptor, art
director, costume designer, photographer, writer, and director. He worked in
Egyptian cinema as well as in international cinema as an art director, set
designer, and assistant director. Abdelsalam worked in Egypt with Salah Abu
Seif, the second-generation realist following Kamal Selim, Henri Barakat, the
director of many Egyptian classics, and Youssef Chahine, the most interna-
tionally renowned Egyptian filmmaker. Internationally, he was the costume
designer and one of the set designers in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1964).
In 1965, he was assigned by the Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz as a con-
sultant for the historical set and costume designs of the Pharaoh. In 1967 he
designed the decor and costumes of the documentary Mankind’s Fight for
Survival by the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. It was Rossellini who
encouraged and even urged Abdelsalam to become a director. In fact, The Day
of Counting the Years, which Abdelsalam wrote, was to have been directed by
Rossellini, who later became the film’s producer along with Abdelsalam.
Southern Aesthetics 25
Abdelsalam was preoccupied with ancient Egyptian history, not only in

terms of the artistic, but more so in terms of the historical discontinuity when
it comes to the so-called pharaonic times. This phase of Egyptian history,
being the birth of what we know now as Egypt (Greek, Latin), Misr (Hebrew,
Arabic), and before that K.mt or Kemet (Hieroglyphic), is alienated from
almost all Egyptians. The reasons behind that vary and are too complicated
to be discussed here. However, it must be said that all that ancient Egypt
represents for Egyptians are the monuments. A deeper or even a general
knowledge about the language, the costumes, the culture, and, of course, the
history is absent. For sure, the colonial era played a big role in this outcome,
starting with the French invasion/campaign of Egypt (1798–1801), whose
accompanying Scientific Expedition of the Commission des Sciences et des
Arts discovered the Rosetta Stone and finally deciphered the hieroglyphics.
The Rosetta Stone was later captured by the British in 1801 along with all
the stolen artifacts the French had taken. Thus, the discipline of Egyptology
came into being in Europe and became a monopoly of Westerners who sent
their archaeological expeditions and continue to do so in the present.
Nevertheless, the different state regimes throughout the recent history of
Egyptian were never concerned with establishing the tools to integrate the
knowledge of the ancient history in the sociocultural or even the academic
spheres. Whether this was due to a lack of interest, or due to ideological
reasons which began with the ideas of both pan-Arabism and the Islamic
revival as the main two strains of identity politics since the 1930s, remains to
be explored.
Shady Abdelsalam observed this fact, and soon his interest in the ancient
Egyptian art turned into an artistic and an intellectual cause. His involvement
in both the foreign films he worked on, such as Cleopatra and Pharaoh, made
him realize both the cultural and historical gap in Egypt in relation to ancient
Egypt as well as the knowledge monopoly, the fascination, and the passion of
the West for this ancient civilization. The people who lived on this land, on
the two banks of the Nile and in the mountains, are entirely disconnected
from this ancient past that runs into the present and partially defines the
lives, the costumes, the language, and the culture of Egyptians until this very
day. Even when looking at the literature, music and all the other arts in Egypt
since the nineteenth century, one would find only a handful of works which
deal or are influenced by this era.
When looking at Shady Abdelsalam’s short cinematic career, we will find
that six of his eight films – a feature, six shorts and a docudrama, and an
unfinished feature – have ancient Egypt as their subject matter. Abdelsalam’s
last unfinished project, The Tragedy of the Great House, also known as
Akhenaten, had been in the making for ten years until his death. This project
could not be realized due to Abdelsalam’s insistence that the financing of this
film had to be Egyptian. He rejected various high budget offers from France.
Abdelsalam argued that a film about Egyptian history must be funded with
26 Amir Taha
Egyptian money. This might seem to be a sort of idealism or even naïve

nationalism on Abdelsalam’s part. In fact, this position was entirely in tune
with his preoccupation with connecting Egyptians with this part of their his-
tory, not only in terms of perception, but also in terms of production.
Producing such a high budget historical epic in Egypt with Egyptian funding
and production would have involved nothing less than the involvement of the
Center of National Cinema and the Culture Ministry along with private pro-
duction companies. Furthermore, a huge number of artists and workers
would have had the opportunity to be part of this project, which would have
had benefited them on many levels, whether, in the engagement with knowl-
edge about Egyptian history, in gaining practical and artistic experience
working on such a huge project, or in opening a space for future projects of
the same caliber. Most importantly, in Abdelsalam’s mind, producing this
film with non-Egyptian money would have run the risk of influencing the
vision of the film: a vision which Abdelsalam wanted to be Egyptian from a
point of view and with the money of Egyptians.
The film at hand, The Day of Counting the Years, produced in 1968 and
released in 1969, is a milestone in Egyptian cinema. The film is a testimony of
Abdelsalam’s artistic project in relation to the history of ancient Egypt, but
importantly in terms of cinema, it is a testimony of his visual and fine-art back-
ground. This film is the first in Egyptian cinema to rely entirely on the image as
the main vehicle of its narrative. In the following, I argue that this film can be
seen as presenting the notion of Egyptian aesthetics in particular, and it can be
read as a part of cinematic southern aesthetics in the broader sense.
Reading of Southern Aesthetics

The actual start of the film is prior to the opening credits. It opens with the
face of the coffin of Queen Tiye, also referred to as the “Amarna Cache,”
with its one sightless eye. An Arabic script of a quotation of a passage from
the Book of the Dead appears (Figure 2.1):
FIGURE 2.1 Opening credits.

You who go, you will return;

You who sleep, you will rise,
You who walk, you will be resurrected,
For glory is due to you,
To the heavens and their loftiness,
To the earth and its breadth,
To the seas and their depth.
Following the opening credits, a voice reads another passage from the Book of
the Dead as the camera shows a funerary papyrus (Figure 2.2). The voice
reads, “May you be obeyed, Lord of Light. You who live in the heart of the
great house. Prince of night and darkness. I have come to you as a pure soul.
Grant me a mouth that I may speak in your presence.” The film cross dissolves
to a wide shot (Figure 2.3); the reader of these words stands reading to a small
group of people who are sitting by a large table on which a lamp occupies the
center. The man goes on, “Bring me my heart quickly on the day the clouds
become heavy, and the darkness thickens.” The camera pans into the group
FIGURE 2.2 The ancient Egyptian text.
FIGURE 2.3 Wide shot of Maspero reading the script.

28 Amir Taha
and the film cuts to a medium shot of another man completing the passage
(Figure 2.4), “Give me my name in the great house, and return my name to
memory, on the day when the years are counted” (00:03:15–00:04:05). The
scene cuts back to the first reader; the standing figure who says, “a distant
echo from distant Thebes, three thousand years ago” (00:04:10).
Soon, the spectator is informed that this is a meeting of the Department of
Antiquities, whose head is Gaston Maspero (Figure 2.5). Maspero tells the
group that some antiquities which belong to the Twenty-first Dynasty had
been found in the black market. The place of the tombs of this Dynasty
remains unknown to the department, and the mission of unveiling the secret
location of these tombs must begin. Maspero argues that it is clear the tombs
are somewhere in the vicinity of the Mountain of the Dead, and the only way
to find them is by investigating the tribe of Horabat. Ahmad Effendi (Figure
2.4) asks to join the force and see to the investigation himself, to which
Maspero agrees.
FIGURE 2.4 Introduction of Ahmad Effendi completing the passage.
FIGURE 2.5 Introduction of Maspero.

Several aspects need to be addressed here; first, the cinematic/visual rep-

resentation. The film chooses to start with the hieroglyphic text while the
reading voice is offscreen: a voice-off. The hieroglyphic is a pictorial scrip-
ture, a written language of image. The ancient Egyptian civilization has the
visual at its core: murals, obelisks, temples, statues, and pyramids. Indeed, all
these artifacts consist of various dimensions: architecture, sculpture, cosmol-
ogy, mathematics, and of course, geometry. Still, the dominant mode is vis-
uality, and this is true of history as well. The reading of the history of ancient
Egypt is predominantly visual. The Day of Counting the Years is a film whose
narration is driven by the image: the composition of shots, camera work,
lighting, and the editing. The choice of high Arabic as the language of the
dialogue plays a significant role in the overall body of the film which I will
discuss later, but the visual dimension is what this film relies on. This is in
tune with the visual dimension of ancient Egypt being the core of the story
(Hammam, 2007).
Johnston (2013) argues that the image of Queen Tiye is “an appropriate
and well-chosen opening image. Eyes, ancient and modern appear through-
out the film, they are an element … which is … sign-posted from the outset.”
Eyes in the film are a leitmotif which has to do with the notion of heritage,
history, the psychological state of characters, and the idea of observation.
Later in the film, the elders of the Horabat tribe reveal the secret of their
enterprise to the sons of the deceased leader. The artifact they choose to take
out of one of the coffins is an Eye of Horus (wedjet). The eye in Egyptian
mythology stands for action, protection, and wrath. The Eye of Horus is also
used for several metaphors such as, “Eye of the Mind, Third Eye, Eye of the
Truth or Insight, the Eye of God Inside the Human Mind” (Refaey et al.
2019). The eye which is taken out of the coffin in the film can also be seen as
the cause for the discovery of the tombs, and as the end of the Horabat’s
illegal enterprise. Furthermore, the camera throughout the film shows the
eyes of the characters whether in close-ups or in American shots, specially,
Wanis’s, the main protagonist of the film.
Abdelsalam sets the tone of the film from the very beginning; even before
the opening credits, as discussed above. With the end of the opening credits,
the camera shows the funerary papyrus, as Maspero reads a passage from the
Book of the Dead which includes the title of the film: The Day of Counting
the Years. The editing technique of cross-dissolve between the papyrus and
the members of the Department of Antiquities establishes the notion of travel
through both, albeit conceptual, space and time. The three worlds the film
moves across are existent in the present: the ancient world embodied in
objects (the papyrus, the coffins, the Eye of Horus); the urban world repre-
sented by Ahmad Effendi and the quest to stop the looting of the ancient
artifacts; and finally, the world of Wanis, the younger son of the Horabat’s
leader who lives an inner conflict regarding the secret of his tribe. Wanis’s
30 Amir Taha
world is where the events of the film take place: the rough and almost deso-
late life of the mountain with its rigid traditions. The journey to Wanis’s
world is a journey in time as well and what connects the other two worlds:
Ahmad’s and the Horabat’s. The heritage of ancient Egypt for Ahmad Effendi
is spiritual and continuous. It is his own past whose mysteries are to be dis-
covered and known. For the Horabat, this heritage is physical and material.
Later in the film, one of the elders says that these mummies are of those who
lived thousands of years ago with unknown fathers and forefathers, and
these treasures of the mountain belong to the tribe since their discovery by
the tribe’s forefathers. Here, we see Abdelsalam’s insight. The Horabat tribe
consider themselves part of history separate from that of ancient Egypt.
These mummies have a different history; they are remnants of a distant
obscure past that is not theirs.
The film tries to formulate these ideas visually. After the cross-dissolve to
Maspero and his group, the camera shows them in a wide shot, then it pans
in a very slow pace toward Maspero reading from the papyrus. The scene
takes place at night; it is an external scene: the background is dark, and the
main source of light is the lamp that is in the middle of the table. The slow
camera pace and the extended long takes are what define the film visually
along with Abdelsalam’s unique scene blocking and composition. It is worthy
of mention that Abdelsalam painted a visual storyboard of the whole film.
However, these visual aspects do not just serve an over-stylized aesthetics for
the sake of an aesthetic image. Rather, the unique cinematography by the
great Abdelaziz Fahmy and Mostafa Imam creates a visual dimension of mys-
tery, distant observation, and characters’ psychology in relation to the
notions of time and space.
The camera pans to Maspero while he reads the text. The voice of the reader
changes while Maspero is still in the frame, then the film cuts to Ahmad Effendi.
It is his voice now which completes the text: “Give me my name in the great
house, and return my name to memory, on the day when the years are counted”
(00:03:15–00:04:05). Here, the film engages in the main act of historiography,
the act of writing history. The incident of discovering the tombs took place in
1881, and Maspero was then the head of the Department of Antiquities.
However, at that time, no Egyptian worked at the department; there had been
no Egyptian Egyptologists. The whole text from the Book of the Dead is a spell
of the resurrection of the dead. According to Johnston, Abdelsalam chose this
particular text to refer to “self-remembrance and self-identification. It is obvi-
ous that Abdelsalam believes Egypt to have become lost and it is the young
Egyptologist Kamal who will assist in its rediscovery” (2013). The discovery of
the Deir El Bahary Cache was done under the supervision of Maspero himself,
who traveled to Qurna, and it was Emil Brugsch, the German Egyptologist and
Maspero’s assistant, who physically discovered the cache after one of the
Abdelrasul brothers led him to the location.
In this sense, Ahmad Effendi is a fictional character who according to

Johnston might very well resemble Shady Abdelsalam himself (Johnston
2013). In any case, Abdelsalam gives the task of history and its unveiling to
an Egyptian young man. First, Ahmad reads the last passage of the resurrec-
tion spell. Ahmad is the one who summons the ancient past into the present,
and he himself becomes a part of the act of remembrance for the time to
come. As Maspero explains, the reading and the repetition of this papyrus
restores the ability of the dead to remember their name. Any soul that lacks
a name wanders in endless toil. Losing one’s name is losing one’s identity
(00:04:15–00:04:40). Second, Abdelsalam omits the real historical figure,
Brugsch, and replaces it with Ahmad and gives him the role of leading the
expedition to Qurna. Furthermore, following the first scene, Maspero never
appears again in the film. This act of historiography follows what Paul
Smethurst defines as “historical time” in its ‘postmodern’ guise. In The
Postmodern Chronotope (2001), he defines Historical Time “as chronology,
elapsed and completed time, and records of the past, but chronological data
are often reordered and reformed to suit demands of present-day society; as
narrative, no longer the time of history, but of writing history – historio-
graphic time” (Smethurst, 2001).
Abdelsalam here offers an alternative writing of history in a mode of his-
toriography which is not concerned with the hegemonic chronology of events,
but with their virtuality. The editing of these two shots – cutting from
Maspero to Ahmad – adds to the notion of historiography. Abdelsalam uses
a visual abrupt cut in which Ahmad appears in a medium shot while the
preceding shot is a wide shot where Maspero is not shown in detail, but as a
part of the group (Figures 2.3 and 2.4). The first time the spectator sees
Maspero closely is in the shot that follows Ahmad finishing reading the spell
(Figure 2.5). By presenting Ahmad in a medium shot, occupying the frame,
he is the first character the spectator sees up and close; not Maspero. By
reciting the last part of the spell along with the visual representation and later
in this sequence, by being granted the leadership of the expedition, it is
Ahmad who will restore the soul of the dead, and thus, their identity and
place in history as well as in the present. Ahmad is an Egyptian who writes a
chapter of Egyptian history in the film, and Shady Abdelsalam is the one who
rewrites this history through his film.
The act of historiography does not stop here with the character of Ahmad
Effendi. It goes further with Wanis and his older brother in Qurna. The real
story of the discovery of Deir El Bahary is that the three Abdelrasul brothers –
Ahmad, Soliman, and Mohammad – were dealing with the antiquities black
market after they discovered the tombs. Ahmad Abdelrasul was arrested
after Maspero and Brugsch arrived. Later Mohammad, the elder brother, was
also arrested. The two brothers were imprisoned and tortured in order to
reveal the location of the tombs with no avail. However, with continued
32 Amir Taha
pressure and a promise of amnesty, Mohammad Abdelrasul finally revealed

the secret of the tombs (Bickerstaffe 2005).
In the film, there are two brothers: Wanis, the younger, and the older
brother who remains unnamed. They are the sons of the tribe’s leader, and
their uncles reveal the secret of the tombs to them. The older brother is out-
raged by the tribe’s enterprise and refuses to take part. He decides to leave the
village. The tribe’s elders fear that their nephew will reveal the secret to the
authorities and conspire to kill him. They succeed in their plot, and it is
Wanis now who remains in the village. The secret torments him. Finally,
Wanis decides to inform the authorities about the tombs. The portrayal of the
two brothers in the film along with Ahmad’s character form a triangle which
represents Abdelsalam’s idea of the owning of Egyptian history by Egyptians.
The conflict in the Horabat tribe is between Wanis and his brother on the one
hand and the tribe’s elders on the other: the young and the old. In a confron-
tation between the older brother and his uncles, the young man raises the
question of conscience and morality. He claims that knowing about the secret
is a sin and not knowing is also a sin. The two elders tell their nephew that
his speech is that of the Effendis. They say that this enterprise is what feeds
the tribe, and this is their way of life. The young man replies, “this way of life
is a poison in my body. This is the life of hyenas” (00:23:46).
As for Wanis, his inner conflict builds up throughout the film until the
point when he decides to reveal the secret. Wanis’s inner conflict goes beyond
the moral aspect. Wanis is trapped between the past and the present; memory
and being. Furthermore, Wanis is the only character in the film who seems to
have a personal connection to the monuments in the mountain. In a later
scene, he meets a stranger near one of the temples who asks him if the statues,
the pillars, and the faces ever scared him. Wanis tells him, “They were the
friends of our childhood. My brother and I used to play here and hide”
(00:41:58–00:42.12).
Visually, Wanis is always shown in and surrounded by the ancient monu-
ments. The film makes him a natural part of this environment: the temple, the
pillars, and the murals. In addition, the film expresses Wanis’s entrapment
visually by showing him repeatedly in corridors, narrow stairways, and lanes
(Figure 2.8). Wanis also remains for the largest part of the film a passive
observer, and through his eyes the film unfolds. The confrontation between
Wanis’s brother and the elders is one example of this visual representation.
The wide shots of the brother, his mother, and the two elders are shot from
Wanis’s point of view. The sequence starts with Wanis going down the nar-
row stairs, and when the three characters start their dialogue, Wanis stops
and watches (Figures 2.6, 2.7, 2.9, and 2.10). In this sequence the film cuts
four times between Wanis’s gaze and the four characters. Wanis’s POV reveals
the conflict among the characters through which the mise-en-scène shows a
spatial separation between the brother and the elders. In the first wide shot
Another random document with
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Johann Karl Stamitz, who was born in 1719, became in 1745
director of music for the Elector of Mannheim. His works have no
interest for the hearers of to-day, but in the characteristic elements
of the modern form, they represent a distinct advance over those of
his predecessors. In general, they are imitations of the symphonies of
Sammartini. The pupil and successor of Stamitz, Christian
Cannabich, was born in 1731. Considering the superlative praise
which Mozart bestowed upon this conductor, we cannot doubt that
the playing of the Mannheim band was of great service to Mozart in
his orchestral works, by increasing his knowledge of instrumental
expression.
In 1756, the year of Mozart’s birth, this orchestra had two concert
masters, ten first and ten second violins, four violas, four
violoncellos, two contra-basses, two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons,
four horns, twelve trumpets, two kettle drums, two organists, besides
twenty-four singers. About 1767 clarinets were added, and years later
Mozart learned how to use the clarinets from hearing them in the
Mannheim orchestra.
Burney says of the Mannheim orchestra, “This is the birthplace of
the crescendo and diminuendo”; and the philosopher, Schubart, is
recorded as saying of the orchestra under Cannabich, “Here the forte
is a thunder, the crescendo a cataract, the diminuendo a crystal
stream babbling away into the far distance, the piano a breeze of
spring.” As for the symphonies of Cannabich, they do not seem to
represent any advance toward the establishment of modern form.
From the preceding account it will be seen that the external form
of the symphony was already partly determined when Haydn began
his artistic career. Under his treatment and that of his successors its
growth, in all respects, was marvellous.
Haydn is justly called the real creator of the modern symphony
and string quartet. He enlarged the works, as a whole, extended the
separate movements in their larger and smaller divisions, and
developed the so-called art of free thematic treatment. He first gave
musical clearness, order and variety to the form, and adapted it to
the expression of the multitude of different phases of musical
thought. The stricter thematic imitations of the older masters gave
way to that free thematic play which has been an element of all
concert music since his time.
In Haydn’s development of this principle we recognize a power of
invention and fertility of imagination only equalled by few others.
The originality of Haydn cannot be over-estimated. He discovered a
new world in music. An infinite variety of musical effect was
produced by his new art of motive-building. Haydn also laid the
foundation of modern orchestration. He understood, as no one
before his day, the true scope of the combined stringed instruments.
In his string quartets, even more than his symphonies, his mastery of
the technical effects of the solo strings is most complete; for though
the possibilities of tone-color are greater with the full orchestra, yet
in Haydn’s quartets there is a wealth of musical expression and a
certain charm of style which place them beside those of Mozart and
Beethoven.
The tragic fire and grandeur of thought so characteristic of
Beethoven have their counterpart in the geniality, humor and
playfulness of Haydn. The symphonies of Beethoven may be
compared with tragedies, Haydn’s with comedies. “Papa” Haydn is
never tragic nor sarcastic. His seriousness is imbued with
contentment, never tinged with despair. He overflows with good
humor, and is fond of a musical joke now and then; yet he is
intensely serious at heart, and his mirthful compositions never leave
the impression of superficiality. Haydn prepared the ground for
Mozart and Beethoven. One master cannot be considered without
reference to the other. Mozart and Beethoven obtained the form of
the symphony from Haydn; on the other hand, it was not until
Mozart’s last works had appeared that Haydn produced his finest
symphonies and quartets. In his use of the wind instruments, Mozart
was the indispensable teacher of both Haydn and Beethoven.
BERLIN OPERA HOUSE.
From a photograph.
Mozart did not enlarge the general form of the symphony, etc., as
given by Haydn, but he rounded and beautified the details of the
several movements. His themes and melodies are more beautiful and
expressive, and their working up more impressive and emotional.
Mozart’s last works have that perfection of form and depth of
sentiment which belong only to the highest manifestations of genius.
Mozart left his stamp on all branches of music; he is rightly
considered as the universal master. It was his mission to unite and
beautify the national differences of style, and give them the impress
of his own rare individuality. European music, for the first time in
history, was concentrated in him.
Beethoven in his earlier period shows the influence of Haydn and
Mozart, yet he set the stamp of originality on his very first works. He
was destined to bring the higher forms of instrumental music to the
highest point of development. Although he ultimately revealed a new
world in his mature works, he remained true to the “sonata” form
from first to last. He did not seek to revolutionize musical form; on
the contrary, he built on the solid foundations already laid. Great as
were his achievements as a musician, in the grand outlines and
proportions, dynamic expression, thematic treatment and
instrumentation of his works, we lose sight of the musician in
contemplating the greater tone-poet, who touched every chord of the
heart, who uplifted and broadened the minds and souls of men,
whose long struggle to rise above the sorrows and ills of life endowed
his music with a spirituality and religiousness beyond that of all
others, and which places him among the greatest poets and prophets
of humanity. Further considerations on Beethoven as composer are
contained in the special article of this work. (See page 337.)
Before Beethoven fully entered on his great life-work, Haydn and
Mozart had spread the fame of German music throughout the world.
Their influence was universal, and they had many disciples and
imitators, of whom Gyrowetz, Pleyel, Wranitsky, Kozeluch, Romberg,
F. E. Fesca, Eybler, Süssmayer and Seyfried were prominent. These
composers enjoyed great popularity for a time, and assisted in
spreading the love of instrumental music among the people; but as
their music was devoid of originality and marked individuality, it has
not survived. Of these masters, perhaps the most noteworthy were
Pleyel, Romberg and Gyrowetz.
Ignaz Joseph Pleyel (1757–1831) was the favorite pupil of Haydn,
who had a high opinion of Pleyel’s abilities. Though not so
productive as his teacher, Pleyel was a very facile and pleasing
composer; his many symphonies, quartets and quintets were very
popular for a long time. Greater things were expected of him than he
fulfilled; even Mozart, on hearing one of Pleyel’s earlier quartets,
thought that he might some day replace Haydn. But Pleyel did not
progress; his later works copied Haydn’s style without his spirit, and
consequently his music has entirely died out.
Andreas Romberg (1767–1821) sprang from a very musical family,
which counted among its members a number of noted musicians. His
cousin, Bernhard Romberg, was the celebrated violoncello virtuoso
and composer.
Andreas began his career as a concert violinist; subsequently he
was court chapelmaster at Gotha. He composed several operas,
church music, six symphonies, and chamber music. His most
popular cantata, “The Lay of the Bell,” is still occasionally sung in
England and America. The music of Romberg is pleasing and well
written. Mozart was evidently his model.
The most eminent of all these epigones was Adalbert Gyrowetz
(1763–1850), who presents the melancholy example of an able and
worthy master who entirely outlived his fame. As a young man he
had a brilliant reputation in France and England. From 1804 to 1831
he was conductor of the Imperial Opera at Vienna, where many of his
operas were produced. Gyrowetz composed thirty operas, Singspiele,
and melodramas, and over forty ballets.
Among his best operas were “Der Augenarzt,” “Die Prüfung”
(which Beethoven liked), “Agnes Sorel” and “Helene.” He also
composed four Italian operas, nineteen masses, besides many other
vocal works. He was equally prolific in all forms of instrumental
music, and wrote over sixty symphonies and as many string quartets,
besides quintets, overtures, serenades, marches and dances and
numerous sonatas, trios, nocturnes, etc., for the pianoforte.
Gyrowetz possessed many of the qualifications of a great composer,
yet he lacked the one thing needful,—originality. His facility betrayed
him into weakness, and unconsciously he became an imitator of
Haydn and Mozart. He witnessed the entire rise and culmination of
Beethoven’s genius. As he outlived Beethoven by twenty-three years,
he must have fully realized the epoch-making character of his great
works. Gyrowetz suffered from neglect and poverty in his old age.
None of his music is known to the present age, and his name is
hardly remembered, except by those familiar with musical history. In
the annals of music there is no more striking example of one who
accomplished so much who was destined to see it all pass away and
fall into oblivion.
In the course of the eighteenth century, under the sway of the
opera and the free forms of instrumental music, the style of church
music in general became more melodious, ornate, and sensuous, but
less earnest and religious in tone, than in the time of Bach and
Handel. Eberlin and Michael Haydn were prominent representatives
of this lighter style. Mozart’s earlier church compositions were
modelled on theirs.
Michael Haydn (1737–1806), brother of Joseph Haydn, wrote a
large number of masses, requiems, litanies, vespers, offertories,
oratorios, cantatas, German sacred songs, as well as operas. Mozart
and his father had a high opinion of his church music; Joseph Haydn
considered it superior to his own: time, however, has reversed his
judgment. Michael Haydn’s mass in D minor, “Lauda Sion,” and
“Tenebræ” in E flat are still prized by musicians, but the mass of his
works are forgotten.
Representatives of the more severe church style in Germany
during the eighteenth century were Fux, Fasch and Albrechtsberger.
Johann Joseph Fux (1660–1741) was chapelmaster of St. Stephan’s
and court composer in Vienna.
Fux had a rare mastery of counterpoint, which he exercised in his
numerous church compositions. His “Missa canonica” is a marvel of
canonic skill and ingenuity, and replete with effects of modulation.
His fame, however, rests on his transcendent abilities as a musical
theorist. His treatise on counterpoint, “Gradus ad Parnassum,” has
remained in use for more than a century and a half. There have been
many editions; it has been translated from the original Latin into
German, French, Italian and English. Both Joseph and Michael
Haydn were indebted to the “Gradus” for their knowledge of
counterpoint, and Mozart studied it with equal diligence.
Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch (1736–1800) is known chiefly as the
founder of the celebrated Singakademie of Berlin. Fasch was
industrious as a composer in the a capella style. His sixteen-part
mass is his most important work.
Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736–1809) was court organist
and chapelmaster at St. Stephan’s of Vienna. He composed over two
hundred and sixty works, among which his “Te Deum” is best known.
Albrechtsberger was especially distinguished as a musical theorist
and teacher. Among his pupils were Beethoven, Hummel, Seyfried
and Eybler. His strict system did not satisfy Beethoven; yet the
exercises published as Beethoven’s “Studienbuch” show the benefit
that he had received from Albrechtsberger’s instruction.
One of the most curious and remarkable characters of this period
was George Joseph Vogler, called Abt Vogler (1749–1814), whose
exact place in musical history is not easy to determine. In his own
day a wide divergence of opinion was expressed as to his merits; by
some, including Mozart, he was considered to be a veritable
charlatan, by others an “epoch-making” artist. Want of space
precludes an extended account of his career, which was full of
picturesque incidents. Vogler travelled much, and tried his fortune in
various places; wherever he went he drew attention by his organ
playing, his revolutionary ideas on teaching harmony, and
innovations in organ building. Vogler was a religious devotee; at
Rome he was made Chamberlain to the Pope, Knight of the Golden
Spur, and Abbé. He was remarkably active as composer, teacher,
organ player, and theorist. He wrote for the theatre as well as the
church. Although most of his music is shelved, his Requiem and
Symphony in C are not forgotten. Mendelssohn bought out his
symphony at the Gewandhaus; the Requiem contains original and
impressive effects.
Vogler’s vanity led him to harmonize chorals in order to show how
much he could improve on Sebastian Bach. His organ playing was
degraded by descriptive “thunder-storms” and other claptrap effects.
With all his faults, he was a man of ideas, and as a teacher aroused
genuine enthusiasm among his pupils. His attacks on various
established errors and prejudices of music appealed strongly to his
young disciples, Von Weber and Meyerbeer, and fired them with
knightly ardor. All his pupils were devoted to him; he was equally
fond of them, and called them his “boys.” The picture of Vogler’s
home life at the Tonschule at Darmstadt is charming. His pupils
were his friends and companions. Weber wrote, on hearing of
Vogler’s death, “Our beloved master will ever live in our hearts.”
Browning has celebrated Abt Vogler in his remarkable poem bearing
that name.
During the later half of the eighteenth century the pianoforte
gradually superseded the older clavichord. With the rapid
improvements in piano-making, piano playing and composing
became more and more artistic. Haydn, Mozart and Clementi were
influenced at first by the clavier style of Emanuel Bach, but soon
developed new features in their piano works. Clementi, especially,
carried technique to a point beyond others of his time. His celebrated
studies, “Gradus ad Parnassum,” are indispensable in the training of
pianists.
JOHANN LUDWIG DUSSEK.
Portrait from a bust by Callamard,

engraved by Quenedey.
Mozart brought the piano concerto into prominence, and set the
example followed by Beethoven and others in this form. The
concertos of Mozart are his chief compositions for the pianoforte.
The best of them have a place beside his last symphonies and string
quartets. The grace and elegance of his piano style, and the perfect
balance between the solo instrument and the orchestra, render his
concertos models of form and beauty. Among the contemporaries
and followers of Mozart and Clementi in this branch were Steibelt
(176 –1823), Sterkel (1750–1817), Kozeluch (1753–1814), Hässler
(1747–1822), Gelinde (1757–1825), Dussek, Woelfl, Hummel,
Cramer and Field. Johann Ludwig Dussek (1760–1872) was a
brilliant representative of the piano style, who showed originality in
his modulations and use of dissonances. There is a certain romantic
feeling that characterizes his best piano compositions, as for
instance, his “La Consolation” and “La Chasse.”
Joseph Woelfl (1772–1812) had a brilliant career as a piano
virtuoso. He visited Paris and London and other cities, where his
playing created great astonishment. At Vienna he met Beethoven (in
his younger days) as a friendly rival in extemporaneous playing.
Notwithstanding the partisan feeling among their audiences,
personally they appeared to have a mutual respect for each other.
Though Woelfl had greater execution and equal facility in
improvising, Beethoven excelled him and all others in imagination
and inspiration, in the power of moving the feelings of his listeners.
Woelfl was noted for his breadth of style, as well as his breadth of
hand-grasp; with his enormous hands he could cover two thirds of
the key-board.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837) was the favorite pupil of
Mozart. To Mozart’s example Hummel owed his delicate touch, his
elegant and finished execution, his skill in improvisation, the
clearness and solid construction of his pieces,—characteristics which
rendered him in his prime the best representative of the expressive
style. For a time he was even considered as the equal of Beethoven as
a piano composer. Nowadays Hummel is underrated and called a
“dull classic.” His septet in D minor is a masterpiece, and a few of his
best piano concertos and sonatas are worthy of study. His two
masses are sterling works. Johann Baptist Cramer (1771–1858)
forms the link between Clementi and Hummel. Cramer was noted for
his expressive touch on the piano. His numerous sonatas, etc., are
shelved, but his noble piano studies live as classical models. They
hold almost a unique place, for they combine beautiful musical ideas
with systematic technical training. In these respects they excel the
“Gradus” of his teacher, Clementi. They are indispensable to every
thorough student of the instrument.
Two other talented pupils of Clementi should be mentioned:
Ludwig Berger (1777–1838), the distinguished pianist, composer,
and teacher of Mendelssohn, Taubert, Henselt and others; and
August Klengel (1784–1852), who is less known as a pianist than as
the composer of canons and fugues, which show a remarkable
command of counterpoint.
Beethoven’s great influence on piano music is dwelt upon in the
special article (see page 337). His pupil, Ferdinand Ries (1784–
1838), was one of the leading pianists of his day, and was also a
productive composer in all branches of music. As he was under the
spell of Beethoven’s genius, he failed to show any marked
individuality of style.
His contemporary, Wenzel Tomaschek (1774–1850), displayed
more originality, though he, too, was overshadowed by Beethoven’s
greatness. Tomaschek, during his long career, was highly esteemed
as a composer, pianist and teacher. His admirers called him the
“Schiller of music,” on account of his pure and elevated musical
thought. His numerous piano compositions merit more appreciation
than they have generally received. Schumann admired his music. His
“Eclogues” and “Rhapsodies” are charming, naïve, imaginative and
original.
Having given an account of the principal contemporaries of
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in dramatic, church and instrumental
music, a few words should be added on the subject of German song
composers prior to Schubert.
The national sentiment which encouraged native opera led also to
a revival of interest in the German Lied. It was not until the second
half of the century, when operettas had become the rage in Germany,
that talented musicians turned their attention to this neglected
branch.
JOHANN NEPOMUK HUMMEL.
Portrait by F. H. Müller, engraved by

Esslinger.
Emanuel Bach and two other pupils of his father, Christian

Nichelman (1717–81) and Johann Friedrich Agricola (1720–74),
devoted themselves considerably to song composing. All the operetta
composers we have previously mentioned composed separate songs,
which, together with single numbers of their operettas, attained
widespread popularity. One of the best song composers of the time
was Johann Peter Schulz (1747–1800). His “Lieder in Volkston” were
modelled on the old folk-songs of Germany. Schulz had true German
lyric feeling; he pointed out the way followed by Schubert a
generation later. Schulz’s songs have long been universal favorites. It
is a strong evidence of the innate naturalness and strength of his
songs that they should have retained their place in the affections of
the youth of Germany. They are still sung in German school-rooms.
As German literature began to free itself from French influence,
which had been so potent during the reign of Frederick the Great,
poets arose who gave voice to true German feeling and sentiment.
The lyrics of Hagedorn, Gellert, Klopstock, Gleim, Kleist and others
furnish material for composers. Bürger, the celebrated author of
“Lenore,” enriched German literature with his ballads, many of
which became popular in musical form. It was Herder who revived
true enthusiasm and feeling for the old Volkslied, and with the rise of
Goethe’s genius a new era dawned on lyric poetry, and inspired song
composers to take higher flights. Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg (1760–
1803) was the pioneer composer of ballads.
Reichardt, of whom mention has already been made, was the first
to win general approbation by his settings of Goethe’s lyrics. Carl
Friedrich Zelter (1758–1833) was more closely identified with
Goethe, both as friend and composer. In 1800, Zelter became
director of the Berlin Singakademie. He established the first male
chorus club (Männergesangverein) of Germany, which became the
model of the many similar clubs.
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven did not devote special attention to
song composing; their life-work was accomplished in a larger field.
Yet the canzonets of Haydn, the charming “Veilchen” of Mozart and
the romantic “An die ferne Geliebte” of Beethoven are songs of much
greater merit than any others of their time, prior to Schubert.
The example and presence of Beethoven inspired Schubert to take
the highest flights in his music. Like his great pattern and guide, he
lived withdrawn from the public, and devoted himself heart and soul
to the pursuit of his beloved calling. Schubert’s numerous
symphonies, quartets, sonatas, masses, cantatas and oratorios are
among the priceless possessions of musical art. It is, however, as a
song composer that Schubert stands forth as a great and original
master. In Schubert’s instrumental music the fecundity of musical
ideas, the profusion and beauty of melody, which never failed him,—
in a word, the wealth of his lyric power,—often stand in the way of
the clear and cogent thematic development of his music.
Schubert speaks the sincere language of the heart, and captivates
the ear with the exquisite beauty of his melody. He gave new
significance to the instrumental accompaniment, using it both to
intensify the emotional expression and to enhance the effectiveness
of the vocal part. His rhythm is manifold and animated; his harmony
strong and daring. “He understood how to make the hearer believe
that the keys of C major and F sharp minor are twin sisters,” says a
well-known critic. Nor is it alone the lyric power which moves us in
listening to Schubert’s songs. When the situation demands it, certain
epic and dramatic characteristics come to light: as in the “Erlking,”
perhaps the most popular of all ballads. The unflagging spontaneity
which distinguishes his songs has not been matched by any of his
successors; and his productiveness was something marvellous. “If
fruitfulness,” says Schumann, “be a characteristic of genius, Schubert
is certainly one of the greatest.”
JOHANN BAPTIST CRAMER.
(See page 589.)
It has been the custom among historians of music to consider the

epoch of the older masters as the “classic period,” and to apply the
term “romantic school” to a long list of modern composers of which
Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Spohr and Weber are the most
important names. Such a classification is of considerable
convenience; particularly as the so-called romantic movement which
pervaded literature was not far from contemporary with the
appearance of these composers. But it would be difficult to define
and enumerate the various elements which enter into the adjective
“romantic” as used in this connection; for nearly all the praiseworthy
characteristics of these later composers are present in certain great
works of the so-called classical composers, not excepting him who is
considered so “unsympathetic” by many of the enthusiastic admirers
of modern music, Sebastian Bach. It is certainly true that the tone-
poems of Beethoven possess romantic characteristics which have
been misunderstood or ignored by those who claim for his successors
a wholly new direction of musical development. But in a general way
we recognize in modern “romantic” music the tendency to set less
value on musical construction or form for its own sake than on the
subjective expression of musical ideas. Further than this there has
been a tendency to enlarge the scope of descriptive music, not only in
connection with the drama, but in the application of fanciful titles to
instrumental movements as exemplified by the piano pieces of
Schumann.
JOHANN PETER SCHULZ.

As we have said, the same period was not without strong
indications of similar changes in the domain of letters. We have not
space to give details of literary history, but it may suffice to point out
that, with the advent of the music of Weber, Schumann and others,
Germany was overflowing with intense sympathy and enthusiasm for
the writings of Byron and of the prose-poetizer, Jean Paul Richter.
In the general mental and emotional tendencies of the epoch,
classic calm and reflectiveness began to be lost in “romantic” storm
and stress. The first indications of the new school of composition are
to be found in the works of two musicians whose lack of appreciation
of Beethoven’s genius is one of the anomalies of musical history.
Both of them—Spohr and Weber—were great men, epoch-makers in
certain things. The compositions of the former have, indeed, been
eclipsed by later achievements in music; but we ought not to
underrate Spohr’s progressive zeal. His musical individuality was
narrowed by mannerism; and yet within the limits of that
individuality the variety of his work is enormous. In the development
of violin technique his activity as teacher and soloist has borne rich
fruit. His double quartets for strings have become well known, but
perhaps the general popularity of Spohr’s works in this exceptional
form has militated against their performance, and consequently
against the appreciation of other interesting works for odd
combinations of a small number of instruments, as for instance his
octet and nonet.
CARL FRIEDRICH ZELTER.
Weber, more than Spohr or any previous master, realized for the
German people their ideal of a truly national style of opera. His “Der
Freischütz” appealed irresistibly to the popular taste for the romantic
and supernatural, a phase of imagination embodied in the fairy tales
and domestic poetry of Germany. Spohr, in his “Berggeist,” “Faust”
and “Jessonda,” had already worked in this field with considerable
success; but Weber, with greater musical genius, created in his “Der
Freischütz” an opera which was destined to take as deep a root in the
hearts of the German people as the “Zauberflöte” of Mozart, or
“William Tell” of Schiller.
On the other hand, “Euryanthe,” the most important work of
Weber from the musical dramatic point of view, did not win
universal favor at first; but nowadays it is estimated at its true worth.
In this masterpiece, Weber pointed out the direction which Wagner
instinctively followed, a new path which led to stupendous results in
his music-dramas.
Heinrich Marschner as a dramatic composer was stimulated and
influenced by his friend and associate, Weber. “Hans Heiling” is
considered his masterpiece. We feel the influence of Weber and
Marschner in the earlier operas of Wagner, though almost from the
outset his powerful originality asserted itself. Lesser lights of the so-
called romantic school were Lindpaintner (1791–1858) and Reissiger
(1798–1856). The best of Lindpaintner’s numerous operas were “Der
Vampyr,” “Der Bergkönig” and “Die Sicilianische Vesper.” Some of
his symphonies, overtures, etc., were highly esteemed by his
contemporaries, but his most popular works were his songs, of which
his “Roland” and “Standard Bearer” are celebrated. Lindpaintner was
one of the foremost orchestral conductors of his time. Reissiger
succeeded Weber as conductor of the Royal Opera at Dresden. His
most popular operas were “Turandot,” “Ahnenschatz” and “Adele
von Foix.” They are no longer given on the German stage.
“Kapellmeister” music well describes the works of both Reissiger and
Lindpaintner. They had nothing in particular to say, and said it
thoroughly.
Before Wagner’s conquest of the stage the opera-loving public of
Germany were largely under the sway of foreign composers. The
sudden and universal popularity of Rossini, Bellini and other Italian
composers absorbed public attention, and native composers were
cast into the shade. The example of Meyerbeer was hardly
stimulating to the national musical feeling. Meyerbeer, it is true, was
a German, trained by German masters, but his masterpieces were
written for the Paris Opera: his “Robert,” “Prophet” and “Huguenots”
are eclectic in character, in which Italian, French and German
elements of style are blended; hence his world-wide influence has
not been as a German, but as a cosmopolitan in music.
This indifference of the German public was not confined to the
field of opera; even Beethoven was neglected during the era of
Rossini, and did not live to see his symphonies appreciated by the
many. With the rise of Mendelssohn and Schumann, however, a new
impulse was given to German music, and the great public trained to
appreciate the older as well as newer masters. Under the shadow of
the St. Thomas School of Leipsic, with its glorious musical traditions,
a group of gifted artists assembled, who represent a new and bright
epoch in the further development of modern music. Mendelssohn’s
noble character as a man, his earnest, aspiring devotion to his art,
cannot be over-estimated. His remarkable gifts as composer, pianist,
and conductor served to gain the attention of the public everywhere;
and this advantage, combined with his personal magnetism, enabled
him to accomplish more for the advancement of music than others of
his time.
Mendelssohn’s genius was exercised in almost every form of
musical composition, except the opera.
There are two peculiar phases of his musical individuality which
are most remarkable: first, the fantastic, imaginative vein so happily
brought to light in his scherzos, the most charming of which is the
scherzo in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream”; second, the lyric
element, which is not only characteristic of his “Songs without
Words,” but of nearly all his slow movements. His most poetical and
romantic works are his concert overtures to “Midsummer Night’s
Dream,” “Fingal’s Cave,” “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage,”
“Melusina” and “Ruy Blas.” These overtures are “program” music in
the best sense of the term, and hold a unique place among the
foremost.
Mendelssohn’s genial and refined nature mirrored itself in his
music. Nevertheless, with all the beauty, sweetness, classic form, and
purity of his music, one thing is missed,—tragic depth and fire. He
did not touch the deepest chords of the heart like Beethoven and
Bach, perhaps because his existence was not clouded by adversity, or
because he arrived without serious struggles at the complete
development of his artistic powers.
CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC IN LEIPSIC
Schumann, on the contrary, for years was denied the artistic

opportunities and companionships for which he longed. It was only
in his maturity that he acquired the technical facility which had
become second nature with Mendelssohn long before he was of age.
In depth of sentiment and emotional power, Schumann was the
worthy successor of Beethoven. Like Mendelssohn, he was an earnest
student of Bach’s music, and we perceive the influence of the older
master in such compositions as Schumann’s fugues on Bach’s name,
the finales of his piano quartet and quintet, and the grand
polyphonic opening of his C major Symphony. Like the old Leipsic
cantor, Schumann was a subtle ponderer and deep thinker. As a
harmonist he showed more freedom and boldness than
Mendelssohn. In his orchestration he followed the footsteps of
Mendelssohn, but does not show equal mastery. His piano works
stand higher, and here he owed much to Chopin, whom he
appreciated more keenly than did Mendelssohn, and followed his
example in the use of extended chords, unusual figures of
accompaniment, pedal effects, etc., as well as in poetical imagination,
that rendered every little dance or melody a miniature poem in
tones.
In his four great symphonies, Schumann ranks next to Beethoven
and Schubert. As a song composer he stands nearest to Schubert in
spontaneity and poetic feeling. In spite of the gloomy melancholy
that broods in some of his music, he, like Beethoven, was a true
humorist. Schumann did not abandon the symphonic form, as
perfected by Beethoven, but, like Schubert and others, stamped it
with his own individuality; his poetical and romantic nature are
revealed in all his creations.
Among the gifted associates and disciples of Mendelssohn and
Schumann were the following composers:—
Niels Wilhelm Gade (1817–91) first attracted attention by his
“Ossian” overture. The production of his first symphony, under
Mendelssohn’s direction at the Gewandhaus in Leipsic, made his
name generally known; and subsequently Gade was associated with
Mendelssohn as conductor of the Gewandhaus concerts. Although
Gade was under the influence of Mendelssohn and Schumann, his
musical nature was not the reflex of theirs; on the contrary, his
Danish nationality comes to light in his works. His style is truly
poetical and vigorous.
William Sterndale Bennett (1816–75), the most gifted English
composer since Purcell, should be mentioned here as the friend of
Mendelssohn and Schumann. He profited by their advice and
enthusiasm, but his style is his own, although undoubtedly
influenced by Mendelssohn. His charming overtures, “The Naiads”
and “The Wood Nymph,” have a place among classical orchestral
music.

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Cinemas of the Global South: Towards

a Southern Aesthetics 1st Edition Dilip

Handbook of Pharmaceutical Granulation Technology 4th

Feminist Theory and the Aesthetics Within A Perspective

Telecommunications Industry in India State Business and

Primary Mathematics 3A Hoerst

Pharsalia An Environmental Biography of a Southern

A Frayed History The Journey of Cotton in India 1st

Globalization Health and the Global South A Critical

Global Migration and Diversity of Educational

Dilip M Menon is Professor of History and International Relations at the

Edited by Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

Lists of Figures vii

1 Cinemas of the Global South: Towards

2 Southern Aesthetics: The Egyptian Way: Shady

3 Constellations of Time: Towards a Cartography of

4 Singing in Saffron Times: Documentary Film and

5 Local Realism: Indian Independent Film as a

6 Indian Gangsters, American Noir and Africa’s Drum

7 Contagious Aesthetics: Bios, Politics and Cinema in

8 Dealing with The Precarious City: Violence, Memory

9 Cinematics of Southern Environmentalism 204

2.1 Opening credits 26

3.7 Displaced Palestinians (15:19) 60

9.4 Scene of a leaking pipeline (Black November, 00:14:31) 216

Diego Granja do Amaral is a postdoctoral fellow in the Postgraduate Program

Luis F. Rosero Amaya is PhD candidate at the University of Tübingen

Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram is Senior Lecturer in World Cinema at

Ashvin is Associate Director of the UK Asian Film Festival–London and has

Veena Hariharan is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of

Damon Heatlie is a Senior Lecturer at Wits Film and Television at the

A. Chukwudumebi Obute is Assistant Professor of English at the University

Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha

It appears to be a truism that different spaces have different visual aesthetics

Cinematic Aesthetics in General

of bourgeois individualism. It thus remains closer to forms of existence but is

authors as a process of decolonialization must be examined in the light of the

example of a narrative with southern characteristics: to move from ontology

1 A process of decolonization and deterritorialization

To talk about southern aesthetics, we cannot avoid the historical context of

Thinking Visual Aesthetics from Egypt

Western scholars of cinema cite a number of films predating Italian neore-

An Indian Aesthetics of Cinema?

protagonists, was a break from the cult of personality in popular cinema. In

An Aesthetics from the Global South?

a third element in his argument of the generation of a distinct affect governed

necessary “supplement” and witness to a history of the destruction of forms

common condition that generates conversations and the circulation of forms

“antithetical” imagination that runs counter to the hegemony of Hindi pop-

of humans and animals, and the normalcy of unthinking behaviour, a belief

investigate the matter is an Egyptian. In reality, it was the German Egyptologist

Shady Abdelsalam: An Unfinished Greatness

Abdelsalam was preoccupied with ancient Egyptian history, not only in

Egyptian money. This might seem to be a sort of idealism or even naïve

Reading of Southern Aesthetics

FIGURE 2.1 Opening credits.

You who go, you will return;

FIGURE 2.2 The ancient Egyptian text.

FIGURE 2.3 Wide shot of Maspero reading the script.

FIGURE 2.4 Introduction of Ahmad Effendi completing the passage.

FIGURE 2.5 Introduction of Maspero.

Several aspects need to be addressed here; first, the cinematic/visual rep-

In this sense, Ahmad Effendi is a fictional character who according to

FIGURE 2.1 Opening credits.

FIGURE 2.2 The ancient Egyptian text.

FIGURE 2.3 Wide shot of Maspero reading the script.

FIGURE 2.4 Introduction of Ahmad Effendi completing the passage.

FIGURE 2.5 Introduction of Maspero.