This article proposes a contribution to a methodological and theoretical discussion in contemporary film studies: how to study and teach cinema cultures in the age of globalization? In a first step, the approach to World Literature proposed by literary scholar Franco Moretti is re-visited and discussed in terms of its productivity and limitations. The article then asks if cinematic traditions can be understood in a comparative perspective, as the result of processes of mutual exchange, circulation and friction beyond the confines of a paradigm of national cinema, and along pathways of circulation not necessarily shaped and controlled by the supposedly inevitable forces of Western capitalism. Commercial Hindi cinema is used as a case study – the article in particular discusses the temporal-spatial constellation of Pakeezah (Pure One, Kamal Amrohi, 1972).
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Traveling Styles: Or the Challenge of Approaching Commercial Hindi Cinema as World Cinema
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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Thematic issue / Section thématique
2013-03-01
2021-09-06
2013-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Alexandra Schneider
2013/03/01
Universiteit van Amsterdam
2036-461X
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Traveling Styles: Or the Challenge of Approaching Commercial Hindi Cinema as World Cinema
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16270/16838
13
Traveling Styles
Or the Challenge of Approaching Commercial Hindi Cinema as World
Cinema
Alexandra Schneider, Universiteit van Amsterdam




  Abstract
  This article proposes a contribution to a methodological and theoretical discussion in con-
  temporary film studies: how to study and teach cinema cultures in the age of globalization?
  In a first step, the approach to World Literature proposed by literary scholar Franco Moretti
  is re-visited and discussed in terms of its productivity and limitations. The article then asks if
  cinematic traditions can be understood in a comparative perspective, as the result of processes
  of mutual exchange, circulation and friction beyond the confines of a paradigm of national
  cinema, and along pathways of circulation not necessarily shaped and controlled by the sup-
  posedly inevitable forces of Western capitalism. Commercial Hindi cinema is used as a case
  study – the article in particular discusses the temporal-spatial constellation of Pakeezah (Pure
  One, Kamal Amrohi, 1972).




                                               [T]he film is one of the most melodramatic ever made,
                                                                 beautiful and mysterious throughout.
                                                                            Peter Wollen on Pakeezah.1

  This article proposes to make a contribution to one of the key methodological and theoretical (or
should I say conceptual) discussion in contemporary film studies: how to study and teach cinema
cultures in the age of globalization?
  I use the expression “cinema cultures in the age of globalization” as a placeholder for what was
formerly called World or Transnational Cinema. In a way similar to the label World Music, the
notion of World Cinema has become a synonym for all non-Western cinemas, a kind of pseudo-
genre for the commodification and canonization of the geographical “other.” At the same time
the concept of Transnational Cinema is more and more turning into an empty signifier since
both on the level of production and consumption, more and more films are “transnational” (or
regional or local) by definition. Conversely and perhaps paradoxically, while cinema is becoming
more “transnational” at the level of production transnational studies tend to underestimate the
continuing significance of the national and of the concept of national culture as a frame of
reference in both the production and circulation of moving images – as contested and conflicted
that concept may be.2

Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIII, no. 20, Spring 2013                                                       27
Alexandra Schneider

   The concept of globalization is complicated and contested in itself. Nonetheless I propose that
thinking about, and re-thinking globalization may allow us to gain a foothold to address the problems
of both World Cinema and Transnational Cinema that I just outlined. I propose to understand
globalization here as both a process and a perspective. As a historical process globalization unfolded
and unfolds in different phases and shifts, and dates back several centuries.3 As a perspective on the
other hand, globalization is more recent, a concept arising from a new understanding of difference
towards the late 20th century, as cultural theorist Arif Dirlik has suggested.4
   In order to explore new ways of conceptualizing cinema cultures in the age of globalization
I will begin by re-visiting the approach to World Literature proposed by literary scholar Franco
Moretti and discuss its productivity and limitations in addressing the problems that I outlined.5
Moretti’s approach has been critically adapted to the study of film through the work of the late Paul
Willemen.6 Willemen first used Moretti’s concepts of distant reading and of mapping literature on
to the accidents of geography for studying South Korean Cinema in 2002,7 before developing a
broader proposal for a comparative film studies from 2006 onwards.8 For Willemen a comparative
film studies is “not an alternative discipline, but a detour in order to re-arrive at a better model of
cinematic functioning”9 and hereby expose the severe limitations of “the Euro-American model
of cinema which constitutes the frame for the existing paradigm of film studies.”10 According to
Willemen comparative film studies would emphasize “the universal encounter with capitalism”
and its effect on cinema.11 As much I sympathize with Willemen’s plea for moving beyond a Eu-
ro-American model of film studies, I am somewhat ambivalent about his position of emphasizing
the universal encounter with capitalism and its effect on cinema as the via regia for a comparative
film studies.12 A strong case can be made that whatever critique of the universalizing tendencies of
a Euro-American model of film study Willemen’s approach may comport will be undercut by his
move of introducing a quasi-transcendental notion of “capitalism” as a new universal that guar-
antees the underlying unity of cinema, thereby subtly but effectively re-homogenizing the object
of study from what remains essentially a Western point of view. Particularly in the light of new
studies about the informal economies of cinema outside of the realm and reach of Hollywood and
Western cinemas – Ramon Lobato’s book comes to mind –, it remains doubtful whether hypos-
tasizing world capitalism as a force with which a “universal encounter” is inevitable produces a
useful framework for a comparative approach to the study of film.13 The subtleness of Willemen’s
approach to the esthetics of cinema in a comparative perspective needs to be matched with an
equally differentiated and heuristically powerful approach to the economics of film.
   Another point of contention concerns Willemen’s continuing adherence to the basic tenets of
apparatus theory. As Christian Metz points out at the end of the key chapter of the The Imagi-
nary Signifier (1977), in which he develops the analogy between the cinematic apparatus and the
psychic apparatus according to Freud, this analogy is literally topical and contingent upon the
accidents of geography: it is a theory developed by an European theorist to explain cinema culture
in major European urban areas. It is a theory, cautions Metz, that may lose its explanatory power
once we take it beyond the confines of its culture of origin. However, extending the reach of the
basic tenets of apparatus theory to cover non-European and non-American cinema culture makes
perfect sense if one subscribes to a universalizing reading of the Althusserian variety of apparatus
theory. According to such a reading the processes of interpellation through the cinematic text, and
thus of the production of subjectivity, occur regardless of any accidents of geography and culture


28
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because they are part and parcel of the “universal encounter” with the forces of capitalism that
Willemen evokes, if not the privileged occurrence of that encounter.14
   My own reading of Moretti’s proposals will follow a different path from Willemen’s, one that
attempts to avert both a hegemonic understanding of capitalism as a homogenizing force of cin-
ema culture and a similarly hegemonic understanding of textual interpellation as the unifying
default mode of spectatorship. The question I would like to answer, by taking Moretti as my point
of departure, is: how can different cinematic traditions be understood in a comparative perspective
as the result of processes of mutual exchange, circulation and friction beyond of the confines of
the paradigm of national cinema, and along pathways of circulation not necessarily shaped and
controlled by the supposedly inevitable forces of Western capitalism?15 My reading of Moretti
raises a number of critical points that I will address in my concluding section, and in answering my
research question I hope to contribute towards the global media theory that film scholar Bhaskar
Sarkar calls for in his work on contemporary Indian cinema.
   My own contribution will use commercial Hindi cinema as a case study for this discussion. As
many scholars of Indian Cinemas have insisted, the diverse and manifold past and current cinematic
traditions of the Indian subcontinent represent an ideal testing ground for the shortcomings and
limitations of the paradigms of film study that have helped shape, and in turn have been derived
from, the Western canon of film classics, most notably the auteur paradigm and the national culture/
national cinema paradigm that views great works by great auteurs as transcendent expressions of
the essence of a national culture.16
   While research on the subject has taken great strides in recent years17 commercial Hindi cinema
continues to be treated as a relatively marginal object and to be discussed as either exotic or
hermetically specific, as a popular art form that reproduces cultural stereotypes of the “Indian” and
Indian culture and defies understanding by Western audiences. Theoretically sound approaches
informed by such an understanding argue that Hindi cinema has developed its own language
and semiotics, which must then be assessed on their own terms. As Corey Creekmur remarks, in
doing so these approaches make a claim of exception that reinforces the normative standard of
the aesthetics of Euro-American entertainment films. In order to address this problem Creekmur
argues for a model of mainstream entertainment film in film theory that is broad, non-specific and
inclusive enough to include commercial Hindi cinema rather than treat it as a deviation from a
standard model of cinematic narration.18 While supporting Creekmur’s rejection of theories that
attribute to commercial Hindi cinema (or other non-Western cinemas) the status of an exception
Bhaskar Sarkar cautions against the denial of cultural specificity that such a model would entail.
However, while Sarkar himself abides by the concept of cultural specificity demands that claims of
cultural specificity be historicized, and that they should examine the extent to which the culturally
specific is shaped both by local cultural traditions and international influence. Averting the pitfalls
of a homogenizing notion of “universal encounters” with capitalism, Sarkar emphasizes that
processes of exchange and circulation neither merge completely with the nation-state nor align
seamlessly with the pathways of global capital:

  [R]ather, they operate at the level of the translocal-popular – the level which, while largely complicit
  with hegemonic apparatuses, continues to hold as-yet-unrealized promises of democratic imaginations
  and interventions.


                                                                                                         29
Alexandra Schneider

  Refocusing the analysis in this way, Sarkar argues, holds the promise that

  [b]y examining this translocal-popular exchange, we can avoid slipping into the problems of exception-
  alism, exoticism and containment associated with the multiculturalist paradigm.19

   This brings me back to Moretti, who advocates something similar. With respect to literature, he
formulates the thesis that the modern novel always arises as a compromise between a foreign form
and local material and forms. There is, in other words, always a translocal-popular exchange at
work in the gestation of modern literary forms, rather than merely an adaptation of local materials
to a prescriptive standard format emanating from a dominant cultural source. In the following, I
will argue that we can extend this hypothesis to commercial Hindi Cinema. Paraphrasing an idea
of Moretti’s, it could be possible to say that the decisive question is not whether or to what degree
Indian films can be measured against Western models. Rather, it is important to examine what
connection is assumed between the so-called “Eastern” narrative and representational modes and
“Eastern” materials, and between “Western” forms of the production of modern (commercial) art
and entertainment forms such as Hindi cinema. In the case of Hindi cinema this trade of forms
must also be understood as taking place in a field shaped by political and cultural forces related,
not least, to the country’s colonial past.20 Accordingly, what may appear to a Western onlooker to
be a hermetically specific, but authentic expression of local cultural traditions may well be – even
in popular cinema, or rather: particularly in popular cinema – an act of cultural self-assertion, a
defiant adaptation of Western film technology to a local or regional agenda of cultural policy and
politics through culture. One of the most stunning facts about Indian cinema, Hindi and otherwise,
is that it has maintained a home market share of more than 90 percent ever since the introduction
of sound and even after the liberalization of the early 1990s which included a liberalization of the
markets for cultural goods. Whatever form the translocal-popular exchange of Hindi cinema may
take, it is one that remains deeply popular with its home audience.
   The problematic that I have just sketched will be discussed here using the example of the spatial
constellation in Pakeezah (Pure One, Kamal Amrohi, 1972). I will first summarize some of Moret-
ti’s relevant findings, and then go on to discuss a selection of scenes from Pakeezah. Based on this
outline I would like to propose a number of elements towards a global theory of popular cinema in
film studies that takes into account both the proposals of Creekmur and Sarkar.
   One of the key points of such an approach should be that it can contribute to work against what
historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has called “asymmetric ignorance.”21 By asymmetric ignorance,
Chakrabarty means the problem that generations of thinkers “who shape the nature of social sci-
ence have produced theories that embrace the entirety of humanity.”22 Nonetheless, these theories
are assimilated and dispersed in post-colonial countries. As Chakrabarty laconically states, the
problem of asymmetric ignorance is “not simply a matter of ‘cultural cringe’ […] on our part or
of cultural arrogance on the part of the European historian.”23 Rather, it is about “the everyday
paradox of third-world social science […] that we find these theories, in spite of their inherent
ignorance of ‘us,’ eminently useful in understanding our societies.”24 In unfolding this paradox,
Chakrabarty makes a case for scrutinizing the great European intellectual models to see if they are
valid for the so-called Third World. The intellectual movement on the way consists in figuratively
declaring Europe a theoretical province. Or at least this is how one might encapsulate – admit-


30
                                                                                    Traveling Styles

tedly simplified – his 2000 book Provincializing Europe, which has become quintessential to
post-colonial theory.25 In particular, it is important to him to counteract the posture, widely held
even among social scientists in post-colonial countries, of measuring social development by the
standards of European theoretical models. In these models, for instance, India’s absence of an
evolving bourgeoisie in the European sense must be thought of as a “lack.” The provincializing of
Europe, in this case, consists in tracing the universal demand for validity of European intellectual
models back to their regional realms of validity. The absence of the bourgeoisie can only be con-
ceived of as a lack in a place where this legally would have to have been put into place. Its lack
in African countries or India has to be conceived differently, indeed and first of all not as a lack.
In a quite similar way, Franco Moretti calls into question the normative canonical demands of
certain European literary traditions, namely French and English literature since the Renaissance. If
literary studies measures everything that is produced elsewhere by the heights reached in English
and French literature since Shakespeare and Classicism, then, according to Moretti, this overlooks
a decisive point: that these traditions, while indeed significant, are in themselves not suitable to
provide universal norms because they represent an absolute exception in the history of literature
as measured by global standards. Similarly, while Stanley Cavell may be justified in his claim that
the classical Hollywood cinema has produced more masterpieces, in absolute numbers, than all of
Elizabethan poetry combined, we can still not elevate these masterpieces to the status of a norm
against which everything else has to be measured. Where Moretti proposes to provincialize the
European tradition, we have to provincialize both Hollywood and the European art cinema.



Franco Moretti’s conjectures on world literature and the study of film

   Franco Moretti starts his essay with the question of what it means to turn to world. As a specialist
in Western European narrative literature between 1790 and 1930 – that is, as a specialist of the
grand tradition of the bourgeois novel –, Moretti admits to feeling like a charlatan when he extends
his scholarships beyond the geographical bounds of Great Britain or France to address the question
of “world literature”. Eschewing the traditional Goethean understanding of “Weltliteratur” as
transnational communication through significant works of canonical literature, Moretti chooses
a broader approach and ponders the option of simply reading more books, before concluding
that world literature is not simply a new object, but a new problem, which therefore also requires
a new critical method. Different from David Damrosch, whose works on world literature have
contributed significantly to establishing the respective field, Moretti is less interested in defining
individual works that are world literature through their reception than in the global and local
circulation of certain aesthetic modes. For his reflections on world literature, Moretti initially
draws on a working hypothesis from the history of economy, and more specifically on the work
from the school of World-sytems theory.26 For these, international capitalism is a system that
is simultaneously one system and at the same time displays inequalities, that is, a system with
a center and a periphery (or semi-periphery), which are linked to one another by increasing
inequality that extends into the periphery. The Israeli literary scholar Even-Zohar, for example,
negotiates the relationships between “world literature” and national literary traditions by relying
on the theory of translation and speaking of “source literature” and “target literature.” As for the

                                                                                                    31
Alexandra Schneider

idea of mutual influence, he maintains that this does not exist as such: “There is no symmetry
in literary interference. A target literature is, more often than not, interfered with by a source
literature which completely ignores it.”27 One could argue that Even-Zohar’s argument amounts
to an application of Chakrabarty’s problem of asymmetric ignorance to the field of literature.
Moretti’s idea of inequality, which regulates the relationships between different cultures according
to the model of global capitalism, works in a similar fashion. The fate of a culture (usually of a
so-called peripheral culture) intersects and is altered by another culture (usually from the so-
called center), which is in turn completely unaware of the other. One could object that Immanuel
Wallerstein’s model of center and periphery has little or no connection to a post-colonial position
like Chakrabarty’s, nor is it complex enough to account for the multiple layers of contemporary
socio-economic realities, which have long ceased to be organized a singular center-periphery
model. Just witness the rapid rise of the People’s Republic of China over the last two decades and
the massive anxieties the scenario of a multi-polar economic world order generates in the minds
of Western observers and policy makers. At the same time, particularly in the field of cinema, the
rapid development of what Ramon Lobato proposes to call the informal economies of cinema,
which do not follow the topology of center and periphery but evolve laterally and heterotopically
to the global pathways of Western-dominated trade instead further complicates the application of
the center-periphery model. I will come back to this critique at the end of my article. For the time
being, however, I will maintain Moretti’s basic conception to explore to what extent the model
can prove to be useful.
   By bypassing the canon-building devices of classical literary studies and applying the explanatory
matrix of social history, Moretti creates a methodological conundrum which he himself highlights
by quoting French social historian Marc Bloch: “Years of analysis for a day of synthesis.”28 Rather
than proceeding through exemplary cases studies of universally acknowledged canonical texts,
literary history, and by extension film analysis and film history, need to be reframed following the
lead of Fernand Braudel, Wallerstein and re-built, if you will, on a broad empirical foundation. For
the field of film studies, French film historian Michèle Lagny has proposed an approach to writing
film history based on a serial analysis of large collection of (genre) films, an approach inspired, like
Moretti’s approach to literary history, by Braudel.29 But where Lagny looks for iterations of patterns
in chronological series, Moretti proposes to replace the traditional hermeneutics of the close reading
of canonical texts with what he calls distant reading.30 In order to analyze and understand a certain
time period of regional literary culture, the method is no longer to closely read a representative
sample of influential works, but to read pretty much every book published in that period or area.
With this approach, which requires a large amount of data, it becomes possible to discern and
analyze entities that are either much smaller or much larger than particular texts, such as patterns of
geographical mappings of plots, aesthetic/narrative modes, themes, tropes, or genres and systems.
Combined with his assumption that the Western European novel should not be viewed as the norm
and rule of literature, but as an exception in the history of literature, this approach allows Moretti to
formulate that something like a law of literary evolution can be established:

  In cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system (which means: almost all cultures, inside
  and outside Europe), the modern novel first arises not as an autonomous development but as a compro-
  mise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials.31


32
                                                                                        Traveling Styles

   The modern novel thus does not arise in cultures on the periphery as an autonomous development,
but as a compromise between Western formal influence and local material. A review of diverse
literary histories confirms this finding. As Moretti writes:

  Four continents, two hundred years, over twenty independent critical studies, and they all agreed: when
  a culture starts moving towards the modern novel, it’s always as a compromise between foreign form
  and local materials.32

  Let me state, as others have done before, that Moretti introduces a kind of creeping teleology,
which undercuts his own claim of a supposedly ab-normal status of the modern European
novel. Rather, it would seem that in this passage Moretti posits the modern novel as the telos
of literary development toward which all cultures sooner or later start to move. Later in the
essay, Moretti extends and specifies the formula as follows: “The compromise at hand here is
a compromise between a foreign form, local materials, and local forms, or more precisely: a
mixture made up of foreign plot, local characters/figures, and a local narrative voice.”33 This
leads to a somewhat paradoxical result: against this backdrop, the French, English, or Spanish
novel do indeed represent an exception; what passes as typical according to this approach are the
other forms of the novel. However, the mixed forms, which are supposedly really typical of the
novel as such, only become discernible against the normative idea of the modern novel towards
which each culture sooner or later moves, an idea which likely would have to be derived from
the European model of the novel. Taking Chakrabarty’s point about the need to provincialize
Europe seriously one could go one step further and argue that the formula of a mixture of foreign
plot, local characters and a local narrative voice already applies to Cervantes Don Quixote,
generally considered to be the first European novel. Don Quixote derives its interest from
combining a “foreign” plot (the medieval epic) with local figures (Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza) and a local narrative voice (the irony inherent in the open, flexible form of the novel). As
such, if we take Moretti’s continuing push for a comparative morphology based on large data
sets, i.e. systematic examinations of how forms vary in space and time, and of how they travel
and circulate in space and time, but provincialize his claims of an exceptional/non-normative
status of the European model (which is, as it turns out, really a claim of an exceptional/
normative status of the European novel) and combine his approach and this critique with a post-
metaphysical, post-universalist understanding of capitalism and global trade, we may arrive at a
methodology that proves useful for the study of cinema in a globally comparative perspective.



Commercial Hindi cinema: The case of Pakeezah

   Against this theoretical and methodological backdrop, I would now like to come to the
aesthetics of commercial Hindi cinema and to my original question, i.e how can cinema
traditions be understood in a comparative perspective as the results of a process of mutual
exchange, circulation and friction beyond a paradigm of national cinema, and along pathways of
circulation not necessarily shaped by Western capitalism? I will use Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah
as my example, less in the sense of a case study than as an example that allows me to discuss

                                                                                                        33
Alexandra Schneider

and determine the parameters of a prospective analysis of a larger set of films. As much as
Pakeezah deserves to be appreciated as a singular film and celebrated for its artistic success the
film serves here as a somewhat random example, chosen for the purposes of methodological
demonstration.34
   The choice of Amrohi’s film is specific, however, to the extent that Pakeezah exemplifies the
problem of the merging of the migration and interpenetration, if you will – of different modes and
traditions of representation. The film may be said to exemplify the convergence, and the friction
between “Western” film style and “Eastern” practices. This convergence begins at the level of the
technical staff. The director of cinematography was Joseph Wirsching, originally from Austria.35
The collaboration of non-Indian technicians on Indian films, particularly as camera technicians, is
not unusual in Hindi cinema history, but it is also not the rule. In his work on early Indian sound
film filmmaker and film scholar Riyad Wadia, the great nephew of Homi and grandson of Jamshed
Wadia, the founders and studio heads of Wadia Movietone, speaks at length about how the sound
film pioneers of the 1930s and 1940s carefully studied and attempted to emulate English and
American stunt and adventure movies of that time. The stunt and adventure films that the Wadia
brothers produced for their company based on their analysis quickly achieved legendary status in
Indian cinema. However anecdotal the evidence, the examples of Pakeezah and the Wadia action
films exemplify the migration of styles and forms at the level of both personnel and material – and
in both cases, these migrations are partially determined by the field of political and cultural forces
of late colonial reign of Great Britain in India.36
   Aside from Joseph Wirsching’s involvement, Pakeezah is also interesting for the context that I
am delineating here because despite its obvious artistic merits, it is considered only a moderately
successful film. In particular, critics complain that the film has a disjointed feeling to it and does
not hold together, which can in part be traced back to its long production time which stretches over
a good thirteen years. As Valentina Vitali writes in her essay “The Families of Hindi Cinema: A
Socio-Historical Approach to Film Studies,”37 the preparations for Pakeezah began at a time when
the feudal romance was the dominant genre of Hindi cinema.38 Its completion and first screening
in 1972 came at a time of disillusionment, when Jawaharlal Nehru’s nationalist modernization
project was hitting up against its limits and social fears were running rampant. All of this found its
fit expression in the new genre of angry-young-man films with their key actor and big star Amitabh
Bachchan.39 In this sense, Pakeezah can be read as a transitional film from the feudal romances
of the 1950s to the genre of angry-young-man films of the 1970s.40 It stands in symptomatically
for the transition from Nehru to Indira Gandhi and her economic policy of the so-called Green
Revolution, a transition that also included forming a new audience, a new middle class. If we
follow Vitali’s reading, the aesthetic heterogeneity of Pakeezah – which from a critical point of
view is of course only a problem if you adhere to a neo-humanistic norm of coherence and unity
in attributing value to a work of art – is an expression of different visual regimes built up around
the female lead and her spatial positioning. Vitali distinguishes between three scopic regimes:
hierarchical, perspectival, and theatrical-frontal. She writes:

  Its formal uncertainties […] are an effect of the fact that while the film addresses contradictions within
  nationalist modernisation that had began to become apparent in the 1960s, at the same time the film has
  not yet worked out the narrative strategies required to erase successfully perception of contradiction.41


34
                                                                                    Traveling Styles

   Vitali’s symptomatic reading of Pakeezah has its merits, despite the somewhat literal fashion in
which she derives the social and economic underpinnings of the film’s form from its production
and reception history. Nonetheless I would like to provide another reading, and one that to a
certain degree is in opposition to Vitali’s. As I would like to argue the form problem of the film,
its supposed lack of coherence, is first and foremost a problem of form and not of circumstance.
Rather than through the lens of a literalist materialism, I propose to take a clue from German
comparative literature scholar Peter Szondi and his groundbreaking analysis of the crisis of modern
drama which, in a somewhat more Hegelian/Adornian perspective, takes problems of form to be
expressive of conflicts that arise in artistic terms and are resolved through, or remain unresolved in
artistic practice.42 Accordingly, the “jumps” and breaks that characterize the film may be read not
so much as the product of a protracted production history, but as the result of a compromise that
is indicative of the specific conditions in which commercial films in India emerged, as a narrative
cinema that appeared to be at the cultural periphery.
   What I mean by this can be best demonstrated through a sequence from Pakeezah.
   The courtesan Nargis/Sahibjaan (Meena Kumari) and Salim (Raj Kumar), who has fallen in love
at first sight with the beautiful dancer and above all with her delicate feet, meet once again. The
scene occurs in Salim’s tent, where Sahibjaan is led to by chance. A boat belonging to a rich suitor
is shipwrecked when he shoots into a herd of bathing elephants in order to sail on. Enraged, the
elephants attack the boat. Then follows a leap in time. Sahibjaan, who has apparently escaped, rides
toward the shore on a part of the ship that had broken off and finds a tent containing a bed, where she
falls down exhausted. At the headboard she finds a diary that tells of an encounter with the feet of a
sleeping beauty, for which the writer can find no words. Sahibjaan, however, has no trouble finding
the right word to describe this encounter: love. A musical number begins and segues into another
sequence. The song is a kind of daydream about love being in the air. The new sequence begins
with the courtesan lying on the cot. From off screen we hear the hoofbeats of approaching horses.
The courtesan slowly rises; a Spanish-sounding melody begins which then dramatically escalates.
Sahibjaan sinks back onto the cot, Salim appears at the opening of the tent, but she cannot see
him. There is a cut to his face, then a counter-shot to the courtesan lying on the cot. With the pan
from her face and down to her feet, the shot is attributed to Salim as his point of view. There fol-
lows a reverse shot back to his face, then a cut back to the henna-painted feet, back to him, then
he slowly turns his head away from her. Cut to her face, her eyes are now closed again and her
voice resounds as an “inner voice,” which we can tell from the faint echo. Sahibjaan speaks as if
her daydream were continuing: “Allah, he is close to me and I’m on the verge of suffocating…” It
is a sort of imaginary address, in which it is not (yet) clear whether she is aware of Salim’s pres-
ence. Then the camera changes again to a medium shot, which includes both of them, in which he
slowly leaves the entrance to go somewhere behind the tent to light his pipe. With his back to the
camera he begins to speak, which could be considered a kind of interior monologue. Salim once
again turns toward the tent, and we see the shadowy outline of Sahibjaan sitting up in the bed.
Now Salim seems to speak directly to Sahibjaan. Once again we are with her in the tent, listening
to him as he directly greets her. Then the camera changes again to an outside shot of him in front
of the tent. While Salim is speaking, we alternately see the courtesan in the tent and him, the lover
outside in front of the tent. The sequence of shots does not correspond to an eyeline match, such
as would have been compulsory in classical Hollywood cinema at this point. At the level of sound


                                                                                                    35
Alexandra Schneider

and voice, however, the montage suggests that the two are now speaking to each other. Over the
course of the scene, this turns into a dialogue of sorts since she attempts to answer his questions
directly. But at the level of the mise-en-scène and editing, the monologic quality of the two speak-
ing positions remains in place, which, as I have mentioned, can be seen as the consequence of not
maintaining the eye-line match. Even though the two characters remain in two different spaces, in
front of and inside the tent, within Hollywood continuity editing, a crossing of the line would be
avoided, since this would rather question the status of the sequence: wish, dream, reality, fantasy?
Above all the introduction to the sequence occurs in a kind of “in-between world,” which gradu-
ally becomes a reality for the characters.
   When later in the scene Salim addresses the letter declaring his love, which he had laid at
Sahibjaan’s feet in the train, her hand, which has been slowly reaching up in the direction of her
throat during this off-screen story, makes it clear that she does indeed remember the letter he is
talking about. And at once we also hear a male voice, which reads “her” part of the letter out loud.
At this moment, however, a dialogue from an earlier scene is replayed, which has to do with the
love letter. During this letter episode the music takes on an increasingly dramatic tone, up to the
point where it abruptly breaks off. At the same time the kerosene lamp in the tent goes out (close
up). Then we see a shot of the setting sun, the next cut brings us (as evidenced by the lighting
conditions) to the following morning. The passing of time is palpable, but this abrupt ellipsis
is not clearly coded. The two characters are still separated by the wall of the tent, but they are
nonetheless shown in a single shot. We get the impression that the couple has gotten closer in the
ellipsis. The rest of the scene is no longer kept in suspense. Salim and Sahibjaan appear to have
arrived in a common reality. Subsequently he rides away from her, he has something to take care
of. On the soundtrack we hear sounds borrowed from spaghetti westerns, mixed together in a
clearly melodramatic instrumentation, typical for Hindi cinema at the time.
   What interests me initially in the sequence described here is the specific composition of space
and time, and the alignment and non-alignment of sound and voice with visuals. To a large extent
the sequence progresses in a kind of in-between status: oscillating between the action of the song
and the narration, and between subjective and objective narrative position/voice. The scene jumps
back and forth between internal and external focalization, between subjectifying sequences of
shots and narrative zero-degree, “objective” narration. As for narrative space, the two characters
initially move in two different “spaces,” which are occasionally linked up at the auditory level.
Only at the end they do seem to have arrived in the same space. One could speak of an aesthetics
of spatialized interiority, deployed through a use of film style and the formal parameters of
film that has no standard equivalent in the narrative conventions of Western cinema. From the
normative point of view of Western narrative cinema, this scene is deficient: unclear in its status,
not respecting the conventions of the construction of characters with its clear delineations of
inner states and physical action, and of the coherence of narrative space as a space of action (the
“diegesis” of Etienne Souriau). This effect of “non-clarity” or confusion emerges not only from
the disregard for eye-line matches, but also from the acoustic analepses and interior monologues.
If we evaluate the use of these techniques in the film without taking heed of the standard solution
of Western narrative cinema for a scene of this type, we realize that disregard for eye-line matches,
acoustic analepses and interior monologues are all techniques. Rather than deploy a regime of
space and subjectivity where cinematic space is constructed primarily as a stage for physical


36
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action with attendant psychological states that may or may not be explained through techniques of
focalization and subjectivation, popular Hindi cinema appears to favor a regime of spatiality that
is defined by the dynamics and intensity of affect. This spatialized interiority may well be traced
back to the narrative form of the love poem, and the scene just analyzed may be read as a transfer
and adaption of the paradigm of spatialized interiority of the love poem into the constraints of film.
Thus the sequence may be read as a formal compromise, as a negotiated solution, that transfers
some of the tenets of regional narrative traditions into an adapted narrative medium, fundamentally
changing, as it were, the established conventions of that medium in the process.



Coda

  As I indicated above the approach that I am advocating in this article has a number of points
of communication with the work of other scholars, such as the work of S.V. Srinivas on pan-
Asian processes of circulation and exchange in the example of Hong Kong action cinema in
South-India,43 in which he shows how certain aspects of the Hong Kong martial arts genre are
constitutive for popular Telugu film.44 Bhaskar Sarkar has also made productive use of Srinivas’s
works for a global media theory. In particular, Sarkar emphasizes the importance of the practice
of “borrowing.” He writes:

  Srinivas points to the banality of cinematic “influence” and of attempts to trace it. Originality has
  never been an absolute or even crucial requirement for Indian (or other) popular cinemas: as a modern
  cultural medium, cinema has thrived on cross-cultural interaction and pollination. He [Srinivas] calls
  for a shift of focus to the “processes at work in the act of borrowing,” which get “obfuscated” by the
  “tracking of influence” in its misleading “attention to what is trivial.”45

   Sarkar himself adds a small case study on the reception of Raj Kapoor in China, once again
underscoring that a global media theory should not take Hollywood and its global distribution
network as the yardstick against which all other film cultures should be measured. Once again
it becomes clear how important it is to liberate an approach like that of Franco Moretti from
the terminological corset created by Wallerstein and from its own residual Eurocentrism and to
rethink the problem of “world cinema” on the basis of new global socio-economic theories.
   Similarly, we need to review the concept of “distant reading” and the postulate of large data
sets.46 It is no coincidence that Michèle Lagny’s project of a serial history of film has remained,
with a few exceptions, just that: a project. Film is a complex multi-modal art form, and analyzing
large sets of films poses even bigger problems both in terms of the quantity of work and the
methodology to be used than analyzing large sets of novels.47 A reductionist approach that focuses
exclusively on plot for the sake of expediency, for instance, would completely miss the point
of the sequence I just discussed. The call for a distant reading also conjures up the specter, and
the pitfalls, of a purely quantitative understanding of empirical research. In addition, then, to a
non-reductionist approach to film analysis, a comparative study of film would have to involve a
triangulation of methods, in which approaches from the social sciences and the humanities cross-
fertilize each other and where contradictions and ambivalences remain admissible. To the degree

                                                                                                       37
Alexandra Schneider

that an approach to a comparative study of film inspired by a critical understanding of Moretti
can be sustained in the longer term, the key indicator of its heuristic power should be always be
something that Dudley Andrew highlights in his own critical reading of Moretti: “A close analysis
of key films from any locale should reveal a conflicted cinematic vocabulary and grammar.”48

    Translation: Daniel Hendrickson




1    Peter Wollen, “Ten Crucial Dance Movies,” in Sight and Sound, no. 9, September 1996, pp. 28-31.
2    Chris Berry, Mary Farquar, China on Screen. Cinema and Nation, Columbia University Press, New York
     2006.
3    Sebastian Conrad, Andreas Eckert, Globalgeschichte, Globalisierung, multiple Modernen: Zur
     Geschichtsschreibung der modernen Welt, in Sebastian Conrad, Andreas Eckert, Ulrike Freitag (eds.),
     Globalgeschichte. Theorien, Ansätze, Themen, Campus, Frankfurt-New York 2007, pp. 7-49.
4    Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity. Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism, Paradigm, Boulder 2007.
5    Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in New Left Review, no. 1, 2000, pp. 54–68.
6    See e.g. the Special Issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Considering Comparative Film Studies: In
     Memory of Paul Willemen, no. 1, 2013.
7    Paul Willemen, “Detouring Through Korean Cinema,” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, no. 2, 2002, pp.
     167-186.
8    Paul Willemen, “For a Comparative Film Studies,” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, no. 1, 2006, pp.
     98-112; Paul Willemen, “Introduction to Subjectivity and Fantasy in Action: For a Comparative Film
     Studies,” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, no. 1, 2013, pp. 96-103.
9    Paul Willemen, “Introduction to Subjectivity and Fantasy in Action: For a Comparative Film Studies,”
     cit., p. 98.
10   Ibidem.
11   Paul Willemen, “Detouring Through Korean Cinema,” cit., p. 167.
12   A critical reading of both Moretti and Willemen offers Manas Ghosh, “Theorizing New Asian Cinemas:
     Problems of the Historicist Approach,” in Journal of the Moving Image, no. 7, 2008, http://www.jmi-
     online.org/film_journal/jmi_07/article_06.php, last visit 2 October 2013.
13   Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema. Mapping Informal Film Distribution, Palgrave Macmil-
     lan, London 2012.
14   See also Madhava Prasad, “Singular but Double-entry: Paul Willemen’s Proposals for a Comparative
     Film Studies,” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, no. 1, 2013, pp. 3-13.
15   I will be referring above all to the following text: Bhaskar Sarkar, Tracking “Global Media” in the Out-
     posts of Globalization, in Nataša Ďurovičová, Kathleen Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational
     Perspectives, Routledge, London-New York 2010, pp. 34-58. But see also: Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning
     the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition, Duke University Press, Durham 2009 and “The
     Melodramas of Globalization,” in Cultural Dynamics, no. 1, 2008, pp. 31–51.
16   See e.g. the introduction of Rajinder Dudrah, Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Cross-
     ings in Popular Hindi Cinema, Routledge, London-New York 2012.
17   Important e.g. Journal of the Moving Image. Journal of the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur Uni-
     versity, http://www.jmionline.org, last visit 2 October 2013; Journal of South-Asian Popular Culture
     (Taylor & Francis); BioScope. South-Asian Screen Studies (Sage). Apart from Dudrah, cit., and among
     many others: Nandini Bhattacharya, Hindi Cinema. Repeating the Subject, Routledge, London 2013; Sara
     Dickey and Rajinder Dudrah (eds.), South Asian Cinemas: Widening the Lens, Routledge, Abingdon-New
     York 2012; Neepa Majumdar, Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India,
     1930s-1950s, University of Illinois Press, Urbana-Chicago 2009.


38
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18 Corey Creekmur, Picturizing American Cinema: Hindi Film Songs and the Last Days of Genre, in
   Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Arthur Knight (eds.), Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular
   Culture, Duke University Press, Durham 2001, pp. 375-406.
19 Bhaskar Sarkar, Tracking “Global Media” in the Outposts of Globalization, cit., p. 49.
20 Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India, Duke Uni-
   versity Press, Durham 2006.
21 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton
   University Press, Princeton 2007 (2000), p. 28.
22 Idem, p. 29.
23 Idem, p. 28.
24 Idem, p. 29.
25 For a critique of Chakrabarty see Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, Duke
   University Press, Durham 2010.
26 Most prominently Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, University of California Press,
   Berkeley 1974-2011, 4 vols.
27 Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Laws of Literary Interference,” in Poetics Today, no. 1, 1990, p. 62.
28 Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes,” in Revue de synthèse historique,
   1928. Quoted in Franco Moretti, “Conjectures in World Cinema,” cit., p. 57.
29 Michèle Lagny, De l’histoire du cinéma: Méthode historique et histoire du cinéma, A. Colin, Paris 1992.
30 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures in World Cinema,” cit., p. 57.
31 Idem, p. 58.
32 Idem, p. 60.
33 Idem, p. 65.
34 There are a few publications on Pakeezah, and as a rule they see it as representative of the so-called
   courtesan film. A good compilation of this literature can be found at: http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.
   com/2009/05/heart-of-gold-pakeezah-and-hindi.html, last visit 12 May 2013. There is also an informa-
   tive close reading in Richard Allen, Ira Bhaskar, “Pakeezah: Dreamscape of Desire,” in Projections, no.
   2, Winter 2009, pp. 20-36.
35 On Joseph Wirsching: Amrit Gangar, Franz von Osten and the Bombay Talkies: A Journey from Mu-
   nich to Malad, Bombay 2001, and the Wirsching-Foundation: http://www.wirschingfoundation.blogspot.
   com/, last visit 12 May 2013.
36 Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India, cit.
37 Valentina Vitali, “The Families of Hindi Cinema: A Socio-Historical Approach to Film Studies,” in
   Framework, no. 42, 2000, www.frameworkonline.com/Issue42/42vv.html, last visit 12 May 2013.
38 On the genre of the feudal romance of the golden 1950s, see: Madhava M. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi
   Film: A Historical Contribution, Oxford University Press, New Delhi 1998.
39 Valentina Vitali, “The Families of Hindi Cinema: A Socio-Historical Approach to Film Studies,” cit.
40 Or, as Allen and Bhaskar suggest, as a kind of meta-courtesan film, which in itself contemplates the cour-
   tesan’s liberation from the claustrophobic milieu of the genre. Richard Allen, Ira Bhaskar, “Pakeezah:
   Dreamscape of Desire”, cit. For the 1970s see: Journal of South Asian Popular Culture, The 1970s and
   its Legacies in India’s Cinemas, no. 1, 2012.
41 Valentina Vitali, “The Families of Hindi Cinema: A Socio-Historical Approach to Film Studies,” cit.
42 Peter Szondi, Michael Hays, Theory of the Modern Drama: A Critical Edition, University of Minnesota
   Press, Minneapolis 1987.
43 http://hongkongaction.cscsarchive.org/, last visit 22 July 2012.
44 S.V. Srinivas, Hong Kong Action Film and the Career of the Telegu Mass Hero, in Meaghan Morris et al.
   (eds.), Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, Hong Kong University
   Press, Hong Kong 2005, pp. 111-123.
45 Bhaskar Sarkar, Tracking “Global Media” in the Outposts of Globalization, cit., p. 57.
46 For literary studies, see also: The Global Circulation Project, http://literature-compass.com/global-circu-
   lation-project/, last visit 12 May 2013.


                                                                                                           39
Alexandra Schneider

47 See, for instance, Cultural Analytics as founded by Lev Manovich in 2007, http://lab.softwarestudies.
   com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html, last visit 12 May 2013.
48 Dudley Andrew, An Atlas of World Cinema, in Stephanie Dennison, Song Hwee Lim (eds.), Remapping
   World Cinema, Wallflower, London 2006, p. 23.




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