Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Realist Art Cinema Criticism and Popular Film Form

Abstract

In the Indian context one could argue that in the 1950s high culture for the cinema existed as a series of propositions given ex pression only in the very restricted confines of Bengal art cinema. Commodity forms were represented in indigenous and foreign (largely American) commercial cinema. These forms constituted the dominant culture, but the domestic commercial cinema was the main element in this dominant formation. Critics often held Hollywood up as a model against which the failings of the Indian cinema were measured; and the cinema industry often drew upon Hollywood as a model of industrial efficiency, and as a wellspring of film style. But it was nevertheless the commercial Indian cinema which held the unassailable position in the domestic market. This does not mean that the commercial cinema was an entirely reified phenomenon. As I will suggest, because of the complexity of its form and the cross-class nature of the audiences for certain genres, the commercial cinema constituted a significant arena for popular innovation and creative social and political discourse. I employ the term ‘popular’ for the way in which cultural products intervene in the imagination of social perceptions and desires, but without clear observation of aesthetic codes and practices. Therefore, while dominant as a mode of film culture, the popular was also often anathema to an arts public otherwise seeking to cultivate institutions and aesthetic objectives in line with a by turns realist and modernist vision.