Theme: Cinema and Affect
TheDaak invites book review submissions on the theme Cinema and Affect for its third issue.
The ability to capture life in a film, to produce art through performance has had a significant impact on the way people and societies have interacted with each other. Cinema definitely has been a means of indulging human imagination and wonder. It has also been a form of expression that has both agitated and educated its audience. Often seen as a great medium of entertainment, cinema is more than just a medium. It is an experience. As a source of knowledge, it has produced often distinct seldom non-deliberate sensibilities. Cinema is also a “machine for generating Affect” (Groves 2011). ‘Affect’ as the Oxford dictionary notes can be understood as the capacity to ‘have an effect’ or ‘make difference to’. The “elicitation of Affect in the audience” as Groves (2011) notes is at the very core of “the film-going experience, figuring into the poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and ideology of film viewing”. The ‘Affect’ of cinema has also to be seen in the lines of the performative. Cinema as a performative refers to the “self-reflexive filmmaking process” rather than “just a duplication of story” (Koutsourakis 2012). Cinema in other words can be seen as the performance ‘by some for some’ (meant for a specific audience). The aspects of ‘Affect’ in terms of performative arts can be dynamically interpreted from the lens of audiences who are being subjected to the Affect as well as the creative industry that is taking their Affect as cues and reconfiguring itself to cater to a vast array of diverse interests.
Susan Sontag in her 1977 collection of essays ‘On photography’ states that ‘To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability… All photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”(p11) To fix mortality in a frame, or a series of frames that is to bind time and people and their world in a frame indeed is a remarkable act. More remarkable is the act of participating in consuming, and being consumed by this framing of collective human mortality. Mirrors were known to ancient people as far back as 2500 BC.Early humans have left miniature paintings of self on stones and caves as deep and as high into the world. Human need for self representation has always been a curious mix of coming close to the other while also moving away and apart from the other.The self and the other are always linked in the forms of representation. When a human collective sees a life, worldview and another human reflected back onto themselves on a screen, what does that do to people? Do they find solace in sharing the same experiences as others? Do they remain aghast at their frailties and ugliness reflected now on screen? The mirror and its metaphor provides a unique realization of the relationship that cinema holds to the people, it reflects the people, it builds a people, and at the same time propagates a story of the people.
Emotive and affectual human self finds itself resonating in cinema. Whether it is the mass popular culture being reflected through the cult of heroes and celebration of masculinity. Or the proliferation of a culture of timid femininity superimposed through the male gaze. Cinema has seen mass inequality reflected on a pan-wide scale. Cinema however has also stood as a torch bearer to new thinking and newleam. It has challenged the structures of oppression and brought decisive turning points, sometimes even ahead of its time.
Cinema can also be understood as a mode of production. It creates value as well as extracts value from the ‘affect’ it generates.The psycho-social roles are produced by the cinematic image. The imagery of self that is who we are gets constructed through Cinema. It creates idyllic patterns in the world of people. In mimicking life, it indicates what is desirable, and what is not. It deems something as ugly and as opposed to others as the beautiful. Cinema and the celebrity of the cinema makes certain ideas and behavior acceptable and others condemnable. Cinema hence has proved both to be a tool for propaganda, and also assertive progressive politics.
The act of going to the films, constituted in the physical space of a multiplex, or a big-screen has a history of transforming the meaning of entertainment. It became a public good, a place where diverse people came together sometimes as a crowd, and at others as a nation. Hence ‘going to the Cinema’ became a thing. COVID-19 and OTT platforms changed the relationship of the ‘screen’, cinema and audience. The space of the screen has been sacrosanct, places like Maratha Mandir have long been cultural institutions. This has now been transformed within the cinematic mode of production. The audience has now moved from the relations of spectatorship to the functions of the creator. Television phase as the consumer phase made cinema intimate. The social media generation has made cinema personal. The audience is now a co-creator, a co-producer. The loss of these social culture physical places which were affectual public entities for their audiences have not been without ramifications. There is a wide gap between internet audience and mass traditional audiences.
Films, art and performance tied in the cinematic have given meaning and means to both creators and its audiences. Hence, discussions on books that speak to the theme of Cinema and Affect, including questions of representation and identity in cinema, cinema, nation and war; cinema and masculine; freedom, expressions, exclusion and age but not limited to these are welcome.
Please send your book reviews to submission.thedaak@gmail.com. The deadline for the same is 30 April 2023. The issue is due for publication on 15th May 2023
Please note that if you are looking for a book recommendation on the current theme or want to discuss your book with our editorial team, you can write to us at submission.thedaak@gmail.com.
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