1. Cinematic Art
Lecturer 25

2. Cultural Matrix of Popular Film
• Middle class and their negotiation with the
traditions of East and West and its reflection in
different kinds of cinema
• Rise of popular culture with the rise of urban
middle class
• Middle class has adopted some values of the
modern West while at the same time renewing
our society’s traditions
• Mass culture forms borrowing from low-brow
Western forms without rejecting the classical
elements of Indian culture fully

3. • Popular culture vs. mass culture and how they
adopt folk and classical aesthetic forms as
well as Western forms
• Sliding scale of audience participation in
cinema, moving away from folk forms
• The artist in popular culture – clearly
identifiable individual producer whereas in
mass culture uses his art as a vehicle for
individual self-expression and tries to
homogenize the audience into a passive
source of applause and patronage

4. • Features of Popular Middle-class Culture
– Plays a mediatory role between classical-folk, modern-
traditional
– Varies from region to region
– Dissent formed by conventional concepts of sanity,
normality and maturity
• Features of emerging mass-culture:
– Pan-Indian
– Share the same universal appeal like other modes of
self-expression: commercial cinema, one-day
cricket/T20, fast-food chains
– Relatively uncritical of the ruling political culture and
political stereotypes; dissent and dissenter packaged
and sold like consumables

5. • Art film, middle-brow cinema and commercial
cinema seek middle-class legitimacy
• Clear difference in the cultural thrust of the
three:
– Commercial films protective towards cultural
values of society
– Defiance and criticism of middle-class cast in
playful, melodramatic spectacles
– Romanticizes the problems of the lower classes
– Generalize the specific problems of different
audiences and then exteriorize the psychological
components of these problems

6. • Art cinema and middle cinema
– Emphasis on expressive function of art or
reaffirmation of cultural values is muted
– Provide sharp criticisms and deep analyses of
social pathologies associated with traditions
– Insensitive to growing threats to lifestyles, life-
support systems, etc.

7. Benegal’s Kalyug (1981)
• Karna as a mythic paradigm for modern Indian –
dialogue between Jagdish Chandra Bose and
Tagore
• Lonely search for personal moral framework and
absence of any theory of transcendence
• Mixture of good and evil in all the characters
• Power and grandeur of womanhood is missing
• “the absence of piety brings into the film a hard
materialism, is unable to provide an adequate
critique of modernity for those viewers who live
with modernity but not in it.” (Nandy: 222)

8. The Double in Commercial Films
• Double symbolizes the author’s search for an
immortal self and become a rational portrayal
of an irrational device for self-perpetuation
• In Indian consciousness the integrative role of
the double in relation to self-concepts
fragmented by uprooting and deculturation
• Reconcile two persons who are stereotypical
representations of two confronting cultures
• Externalize an inner struggle to cope with two
disjunctive parts of the Indian’s cultural self

9. Cultural Space & Aesthetic Choice
• “One might add in conclusion that as long as
modernity was only a marginal strain within
Indian society, art cinema and middle cinema
could justify their ideological line of overall
critique of traditions and a partial critique of
modernity. Now that modernity has become the
dominant principle in Indian public life, when
much of the oppression and violence in Indian
public life is inflicted in the name of categories
such as development, science, progress, and
national security, there has grown a tacit demand
for a different kind of political attitude towards
cultural traditions.” (p. 235)