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Moinak Biswas
i.
These reflections are prompted by the new cinephilia
that is emerging across cities in India. I have in mind the small
groups forming in Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Calcutta, Hyderabad,
Chennai, and in smaller cities and towns, around the LCD projector
and the DVD player, holding screenings of select films, often
accompanied by discussions. The DVDs come from lending libraries and
private collections, copy culture providing the basis to the creation
of resource. I have had the opportunity to participate in discussions
at a few such screenings recently. They seem to be a reincarnation of
the film society in the digital era. The film society had its origins
in India in 1947, reached its peak in the 1970s, and went into a
steady decline in the mid-1980s. If video played a major role in that
decline it is the DVD which is bringing it back to a new life from
the ashes. It is, of course, a new life, and therefore, different in
its promise. The composition of the groups itself is different,
connected as it is to virtual societies on the Web, linked to home
viewing facilities that were not available to the earlier film
society members, smaller in size, and based more or personal
acquaintance and friendship.
ii.
It is difficult for the Film Studies we practice to echo
these moments of gratitude. To repeat the point about the connection
between the new cinephilia and film practice, the technique that I
mention above cannot be a part of the standard cinema, Hollywood,
Bombay or Chennai. As someone associated with academic Film Studies
in India, I see a chasm opening up once more between our work and the
cinephile's engagement at this point. It is not the first time, since
Film Studies began by marking a distance from the existing cinephile
discourse. The latter was a discourse conducted under the aegis of
the film society movement. The first generation of Indian Film
Studies practitioners all came from that background. The new
scholarship they represented became visible in the late 1980s. Film
Studies soon found itself ensconced in the academia, the first full
fledged Department with a postgraduate curriculum was to be launched
at Jadavpur University in 1993. I have been asked here to speak from
the experience of being associated with the Department; hence you
will forgive me this quick overview based on personal impressions. A
divergence from the film art discourse was necessary, we thought, to
open a domain proper to the historical-cultural understanding of
film. The auteurist bias, the focus on select films, prevented
historical investigation, re-produced notions of art and the artist
which appeared problematic in the face of the challenges from Theory.
The absence of any historical account of the institution of Indian
cinema, for example, was obviously a product of the rarefied
'appreciation' approach to film that the existing discourse had. I
come from a city which had an active film society movement, and it
was also home to some of the most prominent practitioners of
alternative cinema in India, including Satyajit Ray and Ritwik
Ghatak. Film Studies there had a paradoxical circumstance of birth.
It was possible to motivate the university to launch a Department of
Film Studies in the face of skepticism from the academic old guard
because of the prestige film culture enjoyed among the intellectuals;
on the other hand, soon upon the formation of the Department it
became clear that the writers and organizers belonging to the film
society culture did not identify themselves with our work. That they
found our business esoteric was only one side of the problem; they
also found it baffling that we shifted our attention from the art of
cinema entirely to its culture, and therefore, also got occupied with
a kind of cinema which the film society movement was launched to debunk.