Terrorist Still-Life

Abstract

This essay argues that as Santosh Sivan’s 1998 film Theeviravaathi (The Terrorist) is haunted by the spectre of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, it materially reproduces the still image of his assassin’s body, which circulated in the Indian media, through the use of extended close-ups of the near-motionless female main character, the eponymous terrorist. Evoking the use of penal and ethnological photography by British colonial authorities in India, this curious stilling of the motion picture aims to quiet anxieties about unruly and fugitive figures of violence. The photographic image of the face, in this context, becomes the terms of identifiability and the limits of interiority. At the same time, however, the cinematic containment of the terrorist body is a decapitation that begs precisely the questions of intent, of agency, and of humanness that form was intended to evade. Now read from the perspective of a post-9/11 world and the global War on Terror, it becomes clear that this mode of image capture worked in service of apprehension; today, image capture of the terrorist still-life works in service of obliteration.