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Dissertation
A cinema of partitioned subjects: Ritwik Ghatak, 1960-1974
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Autumn 2014
DOI: 10.17077/etd.005243
Abstract
Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976), best known for his Bengali feature fiction films based on the Partition of India is acknowledged as a pioneer in Indian cinema.Yet, he remains an uneasy figure to manage within film studies. He is not quite fore-grounded as a major auteur like Satyajit Ray, or feted for popular appeal like Raj Kapoor and Yash Chopra, but at the same time has remained resistant to marginalization. He also continues to be a difficult name to relegate to lists of filmmakers - art-house, realist, commercial, experimental etc. This dissertation examines Ritwik Ghatak's film style closely to consider his engagement with social relations and historical processes through the form of cinema. The aim of my study is to elucidate that Ghatak produces a grammar unique to his films. This grammar stands in contra-distinction to available aesthetic and formal practices of Indian popular and art filmmaking practices.
My study traces the ways in which Ghatak subverts established ways of viewing and inhabiting public texts by rupturing genre conventions, mythologies, and audio-visual relations in cinema. This dissertation shows that Ghatak's singular film stylistics allows his films to act as sites of mourning the Partition of the country on the eve of independence from British rule in the August of 1947. I contend that Ghatak's films are an exercise in aesthetic-political praxis in that they stage a confrontation between the violence of the rhetoric of nationalism, and the conditions inherent in cultural and social formations that allow this rhetoric to succeed. In addition I argue that the grammar of films allows for the formation of singular cinematic subjectivities and collectivities that have an ethical potential.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- A cinema of partitioned subjects: Ritwik Ghatak, 1960-1974
- Creators
- Sushmita Banerji
- Contributors
- Corey Creekmur (Advisor)Garrett Stewart (Committee Member)David H Wittenberg (Committee Member)Kathleen E Newman (Committee Member)Steve Choe (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- Film Studies
- Date degree season
- Autumn 2014
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- DOI
- 10.17077/etd.005243
- Number of pages
- vii, 261 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2014 Sushmita Banerji
- Language
- English
- Description illustrations
- illustrations
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-259).
- Academic Unit
- Cinematic Arts
- Record Identifier
- 9983780000302771
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