In the Centrifuge of History

Abstract

In the Centrifuge of History Ravi Vasudevan (bio) This article uses the cinemas of South Asia to outline an argument for how to think of film history outside the familiar paradigms of national cinemas, and of global cinemas that take Hollywood as their main reference point. At the outset, I will outline a certain conundrum that defines the trajectory of Film Studies and history in this part of the world. As part of a broader postcolonial agenda, the emergence of an academic field for Film Studies in India was caught up with understanding the complexity of aesthetic and political challenges faced by Indian filmmakers under colonialism. This involved exploring how traditions of iconography and representation, of performance and audience cultures came together with new technologies of mechanical reproduction and new capacities to generate audiences.1 Subsequently, art historical and visual studies and anthropological research have demonstrated the wide range of interrelated transformations taking place in the aesthetic sphere under colonialism, challenging hermetic approaches to film history.2 Along with the new skills associated with the camera, it was recognized that a host of others, in visual figuration, melodic [End Page 135] articulation, set design, and so on, arose from a complex matrix of traditions that left their imprint on a range of media, from radio and gramophone to popular print culture and cinema. It is now possible to see these currents of research mapping a distinctly centrifugal logic for the field: history is intelligible as distributed into various elements, which in turn, implies several histories; this means that an understanding of the object, cinema, can only emerge from its dispersal. This poses a further question: If the object can only be adequately accessed through a web of diverse practices, then why should it be worthy of singular attention? What is the rationale for film history as opposed to, say, the history of art, popular visual, narrative, and performance cultures under regimes of mechanical production, reproduction, and extended circulation? Even if we keep our sight lines focused on the cinema, we increasingly discern a powerfully decentered logic of practices. In this short essay, I will focus on how the cinema in the subcontinent was defined by, among other features, differences in the technologies and reception contexts through which film circulated, featuring the apparently obsolete alongside the novel. If the temporality of the cinematic institution and apparatus comes under review in such a centrifugal history, I will also consider how cinema as a form and institutional matrix becomes dispersed in space, as constituent elements in its makeup are distributed in a wide territorial network. I will conclude by coming back to my opening question: What is the status and value of a film history as opposed to a more general and dispersed field of exploration? "Microcinema" and Heterogeneous Time. Researching the history of that early form of film projector, the bioscope, and its afterlives in the subcontinent, Sudhir Mahadevan argues for the "obviation of obsolescence."3 His research not only maps early cinema practices but also proposes a specific angle, the small-scale technology of the early projector, and the wider phenomenon of the traveling cinema, as ways of navigating cinema history. In Mahadevan's work, the bioscopewallah is not something residual, a leftover curiosity, or marker of cinematic cultures in "backward" or "developing" cultures. He also provides a way of thinking about cinema, exhibition, and viewership through a specific dynamic. At one level his work involves altering focus to capture cinema at the interstices of laws, institutions, and settled formats, thereby generating a perspective for the field that shifts from the formal institutions of cinema—the licensed, permanent cinema theater subject to various types of regulation—to informal, small-scale gatherings at street corners and inside tenement buildings. Add to this the persistence of traveling cinemas that cater to small-town and rural markets, and he presents us with more than simply a minority practice. Furthermore, it might be argued that the bioscope carries genealogical features that relate it to a host of practices that weave into the contemporary film/media sphere. Mahadevan's work on this early technology showcases a particular [End Page 136] coordination of the elements which compose...