Towards Another ‘–Image’: Deleuze, Narrative Time and Popular Indian Cinema

Abstract

Popular Indian cinema provides a test case for examining the limitations of Gilles Deleuze's categories of movement-image and time-image. Due to the context-specific aesthetic and cultural traditions that inform popular Indian cinema, although it appears at times to be both movement- and time-image, it actually creates a different type of image. Analysis of Toofani Tarzan (1936) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) demonstrates how, alternating between a movement of world typical of the time-image, and a sensory-motor movement of character typical of the movement-image, popular Indian cinema explores the potential fluxing of identities that emerge during moments of historical complexity.

Singing Bodies and ‘Movement’ Images in a 1937 Tamil Film

“…Yes, the images in the popular Indian films are typified by their affinity to the characteristics of both movement and time images. However, as he himself vouched for the normative bias inherent in Gopalan’s (2002) notion of ‘cinema of interruptions’, there is a stronger need to move away from the notions of Western aesthetics of film art and it is not going to happen if we are fixated on the notions of ‘cinema of interruptions’ (Gopalan 2002) or ‘cinema of spectacular interruptions’ (Martin-Jones 2008). Any commercial Indian film has to be seen in the same manner as the average Indian film viewer sees it—an organic whole, where the stars, their songs, stunts, moments of laughter and tragedies are interwoven more like a tightly knit fabric and less like a curtain of venetian blinds.…”

“…To invoke Raymond Williams’ notion of ‘flow’ (1974), every popular Indian film is a plane of ‘flows’ and not ‘interruptions’. Moreover, the notion of ‘cinema of interruptions’ appears to take a condescending view of the Indian film aesthetic and is no better than the ‘ masala image’ (Martin Jones 2008) of Indian cinemas. This article argues that despite the Eurocentric contexts of film philosophy and the non-European/non-Hollywood characteristics of Indian cinemas, the two can meet on the plane of film analysis to test the ‘limits’ of Deleuzian film philosophy in creative ways.…”