The Identity Construction through Images-a Postcolonial experience in Contemporary Indian Cinema
One of film's most powerful political and sociological forms is national cinema. Nations and ideological groups can construct and reinforce their collective identities through films. Too often the concept of national cinema is taught as though it was always linked to a nation-state, and most given national cinemas could be linked to a set of common stylistic or thematic (and often nationalism-related) problems. National cinemas are identified and discussed for the national consciousness it brings forth. A national cinema speaks to a national/international movement of struggle through images. The cinema’s extended circulation of images afforded a framework of subjectivity that is intimely related to other mechanisms of extended imaging and these formed the basis of a modern nationalistic perception.
Indian cinema as a mass medium as well as an art is on a continous swing. It is an institution of modernity, where it is engaged in the mechanical reproduction of images and has a fundamental impact on the way how representations are refracted through its mechanism. There by a new public sphere of visual technology is heralded constituting new horizons of experiences in the expanded field of space-time relation. Indian Cinema has a tradition popularized by Mani Ratnam a decade ago with the release of Bombay (today it is Mumbai Meri Jaan, Black Friday- probing the shocking truth behind the 93’ Bombay blasts) to picturise the grim dystopic space of the Bombay city in the time of communal riots. Then this theme had been passed on to the filmmakers who are vigilant on handling these sensitive issues more subtly when they are under the scrutiny of Indian Film Censor Board if they constructs any provocative images to kindle the spectators. The select cinema have strong symbolic representation through images in bringing out the semiotics of the celluloid. The signs speak out largely the cultural politics on nationalism, ideas and interpretations which are transnationally powerful, assertive to bring out a discourse. Cinema brings out the hidden cultural politics tactfully going side by side with the objective reality and collective secularism surviving the protests and ban from the religious groups, still succeeds in disseminating its ideology to the mob.
The primary observation on the select cinema entails the precarity of human lives under the assault in the name of religion, terrorism and racism. The audacious montage of the moving images which brings different perspectives of onslaught put the senses of the audience into a congenial confusion that whether the events are the real replication of the reality or it is a neutralized reality exaggerated for its stylization. The narrative reminds of the power of the fiction that succeeds in creating an eerie among the people on the onslaught and the trauma faced by the characters when synchronously positioned in a particular catastrophic city/street. The stylization of the atrocity eliminates its primacy and puts it on an equal footing with the other gestures it co-operates with. The mise-en scene elements portray the tenuous style to bring out rhetorical discourses and it functioned on equal terms alongside the dialogue to leave a psychological impression on the spectators.
The cinema that portray violence employs signs which signify meanings. The raw materials within the shots are capable of provoking a discrete reaction within the spectator. The main values of such neutralization of elements are transference and synesthesia. In the films like Parzaania, My Name Is Khan(MNIK), Firaaq the mis en scene elements contributes to the religious symbols heightening the effect that calls for danger. The films like MNIK, NewYork, Khuda kay liye and various other films bring out the possibility of synaesthesia,or multisensory experiences on the viewers especially the scenes in the closet of Guantanamo Bay where the spectators are cognitively made to see,hear,feel and nearly smell the monstrosity of the event.
Propaganda is a politics and can be represented and manipulated in films. Russian producers Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin with the birth of propaganda aesthetics, for which the underlying assumption was that by manipulating cinematic images representing reality, they could manipulate spectators' concepts of reality. The form of representation claims to mirror reality, making the manipulation of an audience that much more obscured. Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory is one of the lenses which magnify the religious dimensions of conflict. Religion is often used to justify conflict, and becomes a source of conflict, even though most religions of the world emphasize peaceful coexistence and tolerance.
NewYork,Filmed by Kabir Khan interrogates the politics behind the identity before and after 9/11. The story progresses through the lives of three friends and how their lives worn out with unprecedented racial attacks and the film shows how a jehad is born out of the trauma and insults one faces being a muslim and his intense revenge towards FBI in NewYork.
Most recently, the Global War on Terror (GWOT), spurred by the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and perceived by various quarters as a wider Islamist threat, has been observed as the the most blatant manifestation of the clash of civilizations. “The Clash of Civilizations” as per Huntington’s thesis (1996) Greater line thickness represents greater conflict in the civilizational relationship .Huntington’s theory has generated immense debate in the developments since 9/11 with the launch of the GWOT, and others incidents that have signalled an escalation of tensions between Islam and the West.
MNIK (Karan Johar)- The narration is done by Rizwan Khan whose identity as a muslim is challenged in NewYork as a terrorist after the 9/11. He sets out in a unique journey to meet the president of America to reaffirm his identity that his name is Khan and he is not a terrorist. The various images in the film which interrogates the Asian’s identity is creatively amalgamated into the film experience. The film speaks about the racial stereotyping which is done in the city after every communal or terrorist attack which is a universal response holding the power of segregation and creating bipolarity among the citizen. The cinema handled race as a complex cultural construction which is more over like a flexible mental device on the basis of classification which demands profound and unbridgeable differences among human beings.
KHUDA KAY LIYE (Shoaib Mansoor) -The filmmaker sees through the confusion of history and psychology and created a smooth train of images which would lead to an overall narrative event. The question of identity is well debated in the film where the location of the script simultaneously progresses in US, London, Pakistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa a tribal border of Pakistan and Afganistan. The film portrays the before and after stages of 9/11 in Asia and Europe and the identity issues that comes along. The film screens the religious complexity in identifying one another.The Sikh males usually using turbans are stereotypically assosciated with Muslims by many Americans and are often the victims of backlash. The complicated public perceptions of the attacks gave birth to the new brands of stereotypes fuelling wide spread discrimination and problamatising the identity of the east.
Emphasizing images of women, I argue that the representations of of widely circulated images of Afghan people in building public support for the 2001–2002 U.S. war with Afghanistan, participate in the more general category of “the clash of civilizations,” which constitutes a verbal and a visual ideograph linked to the idea of the “white man's burden.”Through the construction of binary oppositions of self and Other, the evocation of a paternalistic stance toward the women of Afghanistan, and the figuration of modernity as liberation, these images participate in a set of justifications for war that contradicts the actual motives for the war. These contradictions have a number of implications for democratic deliberation and public life during wartime.(Dana.L.Cloud,To veil the threat of terror-Afgan women and the Clash of Civilizations in the imagery of the US war on Terrorism)
PARZAANIA (Raahul Dholakia)-Imaginative reproduction of a real event that occurred during 2002 Gujrat violence. The director demands the plot as a subtle piece of realism. As Pudovkin believed to force the spectators to experience a film event as if it were a natural event. He can slyly direct and control the attention and emotions of the spectator as he leads him not through the confusion of history but through the clarity of the reality reorganized on films so that its hidden relationship have been brought out.
The narrative is through the eyes of a westerner, Allan played by Corin Nemec, who is supposed to be the director Raahul Dholakia himself who was painfully wounded on the atrocity that hits his native land,Gujarat. He takes the lens of a westerner and politicise the communal riot,when he and the Parsi family treats themselves as ‘the other’ being placed in Gujarat and holds their neutral position towards India’s religion and politics. There are brilliant sequences tapped in the film on how the east is looked upon by the west. The assertion of their identity to escape from the assault brings out the importance of questioning ones identity which decides the precarity of his life. The question of identity is decisive of ones life; it determines his right to survive from a crestfallen violence where every section of people who occupy the particular geographical area is vulnerable to death. For example, the identity of women is in risk where the sexual violence is used as a strategy for terrorising women belonging to minority community in the state.
FIRAAQ (Nandita Das)- We have analysed the name politics in Mr and Mrs Iyer that how the politics of name decides one’s life span in a violence stricken street or may be even in a travel through these violence prone area. The city/street becomes the substrate where the key of insane religious frenzy operates to open up the brutal violence. We while imag(in)ing the city, the idea of the city is constructed as a space of dystopia which suffers and survives any violence. The imagery of violence is considered as an archaeological tool in excavating and interrogating the modernity. It is an inevitable affair and it affects certain lives but city keeps to its maxim of transformation that it acts as a stage and spectator simultaneously celebrating the catastrophe recuperating from the vacuum of the space with new architectural endeavors and dynamism. The music works brilliantly, working as a major 'mise-en-scene'. The film is so bright that it will hurt somewhere inside.
No city remains as static, it is in a constant state of flux reorganizing its space and physiognomy hardly affecting the metabolism of the city when the traumatic individuals remain stagnant as a result of a non-sequential understanding of time and fragmentation of space. The research proposes how the citizen who has experienced the trauma of terror align her (him)self with regard to the nation/state as they respond to the terror when they are cognitively displaced in the spatial transformation of the urbanspace after the catastrophe. The city recuperates and transforms from the dystopian action but certain characters of the select cinema are traumatized badly as a result of racism or communalism which hazardously makes them incompatible to fit in the geographical space where they again have to contest for the re-affirmation of their real identities.
KABUL EXPRESS (Kabir Khan)-Imaginative production of a situation in Afganistan adding comic aura that describes about the lives of two Indian journalists. The cameras are used as their instrument to record the war. In the context of war photography, the image may reflect or document a war ;at times it may rally emotional responses either in support of the war effort or in resistance to it.
Cities signified in the films are considered as a subjective mental construct and is opened for multiple interpretations because of its post structural qualities. The contemporary cultural theory on violence, nation and identity and film theory would be applied to substantiate the underlying aesthetic politics in the film to disseminate the psychological understanding of the characters who are alienated in the urbanspace in their search for the lost identities. The popular perception of the violence in a street/city is suffused with visual idioms and traditional culture producers use or mimic them for heightened emotions. The advertisements of the select cinemas displays as ‘the work of fiction based on thousand true stories’ where the visual has not eclipsed the aural as a mode of religious expression and understanding, but it has incorporated within the traditional discursive forms in recognition of its power and pervasiveness in contemporary popular culture.
The question of identity and how decisively it becomes the reason of survival is the common thread of all the scripts. A person’s identity has many attributes. It is the representation of one’s unique personal experience, memory, ethnicity, culture, religious orientation, gender, occupational role, amongst various other factors. Identity contributes some belief in the sameness and continuity of some shared world image. Identity could also be defined as one’s consciousness of one self and others’ perception of one’s individuality. Urban identity is an inevitably constructed idea where recent theories in sociology have analyzed identity as mobile, dynamic, hybrid and relational. It is clear that there exists an inevitable relationship between place and identity. The complex interrelation between mobility, place are responsible for the identity construction where mobility is an integral aspect of the social life. There is a drift from the rooted identities towards hybrid and flexible forms of identities. Identity becomes a sensitive issue when one becomes diasporic, a sense of vulnerability in his livelihood when he is a migrant far away from his own roots. A person’s identity documents his existence in an ideology. He has a root when he obtains an identity, it interpellates him when he is enclosed in the power structure of a nation. He is supposed to be that citizen written in the constitution of the respective nation to abide the written statements or rules. Languages constitute the avenues to new social identities where as ethnic identity itself is fluid and malleable.
The screening of news is the media through which we knows about the backdrop of war in the select cinema. News frames are conceptual tools which media and individuals rely on to convey, interpret and evaluate information. They set the parameters in which citizens discuss public events .They are persistent selection, emphasis, and exclusion. Framing is selecting some aspects of a perceived reality to enhance their salience in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation. Frames are to help audiences locate, perceive, identify, and label the flow of information around them and to narrow the available political alternatives. In other words, news frames act to direct the attention of viewers and promote a specific issue or idea. News frames have what is known as the framing effect. Framing effects are when relevant attributes of a message– such as its organization, content, or structure– make particular thoughts applicable, resulting in their activation and use in evaluations. Framing has shown to have large effects on people’s perceptions, and has also been shown to shape public perceptions of political issues or institutions.
