Cinema, Intensive States And Schizoids
By Joe.M.S
15 March, 2014
Countercurrents.org
Film studies in Kerala, have gained considerable presence, even in the mainstream electronic media. Though many theoretical perspectives have, to a major extent, been applied to the study of Malayalam cinema by the left and post modernists, it seems, the application of newer developments in the film philosophy can contribute to it’s further enrichment. As David H. Fleming observes in Film philosophy (2013), new theories emerged in film philosophy during a period when grand theories were contested by the influence of David Bordwell’s post theory and thus Zizek, Badiou and before them Gilles Deleuze, reinvigorated a philosophical approach to cinema, as against a neoliberal and industrial turn in film studies. It is in this context that the brilliant contribution of Anna Powell in her book, Deleuze and Horror Films (2005), becomes noteworthy as a timely intervention. The sheer thrill of reading this interesting work, which helped me like a user’s manual to unravel the dense philosophy of Deleuze, charged up my mind to attempt to apply it loyally, to the context of Malayalam film, though contradictory reading contesting its claim are equally possible and anticipated , considering the cultural specificity of the Indian scenario.
Powell rightly argues in the book that psycho analytical schema is inadequate and opaque to unlock the multiple layers of horror films and its experiential quality, as it’s complexity surpasses mere symbolic or structural meaning and asks for a nuanced response, than the reading of social stereotypes and politics. She asserts that Deleuze’s contributions, like the study of affective mise-en-scene, editing, sound and it’s impacts on visceral sensations, demands a paradigmatic shift from musings on being to becoming. Thus films, as a distinctively embodied thought process, the medium specific technicalities of which are based on the nature of movement and time, are experiential. Powell, using her views in a brilliant exposition of a number of movies in the horror genres, like Kubrick’s the Shining, Hitchcock’s Psycho and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, unabashedly celebrates Deluze’s use value to film studies. She explores the process of collective assemblage with other singularities in the heterogeneous becoming of the audience.
Powell also adds that the technological aspects of film like plot, special effects, close ups, shakes and the nature of film as an event, directly affects perceptions before advanced stages of cognitive processing and that the sabotage of normative by fragmenting, affects even spectator’s cognitive control over subject matter, with its optic and auditory effects on nerves, resulting in a molecular assemblage with film. Thus visceral and sensory aspects of viewing affects neuronal networks, heart, lungs as different from aesthetic contemplation or dualistic spectatorial gaze, as in a sort of mimesis. Powell establishes that Deluze’s philosophy concentrates on the affective phenomena of mise-en-scene and movement in films, turns away from plot to aesthetic assemblages, where hairstyle of the characters to camera movements matters a lot.
It would be interesting if the famous Malayalam film, Manichitrathazhu (The ornate lock), a highly successful horror thriller, which tells the story of Ganga and her alternate personality, is studied from this perspective. The movie has become a modern sort of folk lore, after its immense success in Kerala, and it was remade as Chandramukhi in in Tamil and Bhool bhulaiya in Hindi. If it is studied in Powell’s method, in its diagrmatic components like light and shadow, logic of relations, the temporal and spatial dynamics, and the madness of transformative becoming, by the film theorists with their professional expertise, it can shed light on many aspects hitherto unattended to. Though there have been attempts to read it politically, from feminist to Dalit perspectives, hinting at its male chauvinism and suppression of female sexuality, (absolutely right in its own respects), and the righteous critique about the apolitical portrayal of a literate society as merely superstitious as abominable from the leftists, it seems, any studies which borrows from Deleuze, has to focus on the technical aspects like mise-en-scene, and concepts like affect, body without organs etc., taking a different trajectory. This would shed light on the immense popularity of the film, and may explain the reason why it captivates one even now like an enigma, after two decades, at each screening, with reinvigorated passion. For instance the scene in which Ganaga (Shobana) the possessed individual, is first revealed in her dual personality - the famous stair case scene- where the sorcerers who arrived to exorcise her, are chased away, the close up shots of the hands of Ganga, evoking an inexplicable shudder, out of a combination of fear and joy by the mere the posture of a tapping hand in the frame, is noteworthy. Is it like the dreadful yet touching hand of monstrous becoming evoking mimesis as contagion, to paraphrase Powell? The unique Kerala experience of the sheer romantic thrill of experiencing Yakshikatha and the myriads of bodily reactions evoking the cultural remnants of the past, accompanied by Johnson’s outstanding background score, which increases the heart rate, auditory effects of her anklets, and the total pleasure of liberation the spectator enjoys somatically, by breaking his/her physical boundaries, as a body without organs, facilitated by prosthetics, that is, the movement of the camera, from different contradictory shots, would be worth studying. Same is the case with the scene in which the introduction to thekkini (south side of part of house), it’s mise-en-scene, the invoking of theme music composed in Ahiri raga by M.G.Radhakrishnan, which manifests the pangs of an unsatisfied soul, it’s light up , to know the affect it tampers with. Even the costume design according to mood , which stands out especially in the scene where Ganaga listens confidently yet pretentious as disinterested, to the news about Mahadevan (who in turn becomes Ganga’s secret lover in her flight of imagination/schizoid self) with her cousin, and the elaborate lapping up by the camera the architectural splendour of the magnificent corridor of the palace, contrasted with the human figures walking on it, hints at the subjectivist possibilities of mood, which can be provided only by the potential of cinema as a medium.(Here I am trying literally to follow the method applied by Powell in her study of the Cabinet of Dr.Caligari). The derangement of the viewers who imbibes the ambience of the movie is also important. To draw from Powell, rather than taming the monster from the id, as in psycho analysis, to which the narrative of Manichitrathazhu subscribes to ( as repressed trauma and desire’s stint with dread) in a misogynist vein bordering on gender binaries, much to the amusement of the elite male psyche, schizo analysis offer new possibilities. Psycho analysis falters in it ahsitoricity and discards corporeal aspects of the experience of watching films. The schizo analysis, according to Powell, though acknowledging pathologised condition affirmed by psycho analysis, focusing on discordance and detachment from reality of the delusional mental life and fantasy, is complicated by Deleuzian fluid nature of consciousness. Thus the inner state of mind as contrasted to the outer one of social representation, is one of constant becoming and the possibility of psychoanalytical transference is questioned. This innerstate, says Powell, is time conscious and is the durational process of a dynamic, multiple becoming and in a flux. Or could it be that the enjoyment of liberation internalised by the feminist anger of Nagavalli already undermines the film’s misogynist climax and the solution of Freudian ego defence, wrought by Dr.Sunny Joseph (Mohanlal), the personification of Malayali patriarchy. Wouldn’t it be interesting to think that the floating affects of motion produces desire bordering on schizophrenic intensity, as liberation in the protagonist. Powell asserts that the experiential hallucinations of becoming results in schizoid state and cinematic experience pitches corporeal sensation against subjective control.
The intensity such a viewing arouses, to follow Powell, is devoid of all forms; it’s new possibilities of consciousness and deterritorialisation, reconfigures perspective. An insane’s portrayal as horror may be undermined by the spectator’s direct experience of her point of view (Ganga). In short, could it all be read as producing in a way, even in the subaltern subjectivity, a potential corporeal possibility of liberation through intensified state or is it only to be read as linear as in the politics of representation.
Instead of the psycho analytic primal scenarios of ambivalence, as Powell argues, where retracing of a dreadful desire in lack, in the processual experience of film, both the monster and viewer are engaged in a schizophrenic assemblage, where they experience an egoless freedom from constraint. Thus the relationship with Nagavalli and the audience is unique, where psycho analytic fantasy of the return of the repressed for sublimation is liquidated and the ensuing pleasure as a materially based immanent sensation and desire, not emanating from lack, is a productive and machine like ‘haecceities’. Powell quotes Deleuze’s description of such intensive states as “intensive qualities in their pure states, to the point that is almost unbearable-a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form”. Here, when watching the possessed Ganga the experiential rhizome “suggests the nomadic movements of thought by the intensities of a self in process”. Powell further describes that material capture in space and time, denying psychic depth, focuses on immanence of art as being in sensation, thereby embodied looks stimulates through haptic operation tactility and adds that ,“ the movie cameras technological automatism penetrates and melds with the flux of the material world” enfeebling humanist paradigms, making possible the raw capture of the immanent matter, thus rendering automatism primordial and that “in the case of horror films the visual sensations induced are of an extreme kind able to push through subjective boundaries”. The affective contagion make audience participates in Ganga’s madness (ala Dravidian primordial anger in Tamil against elitism). Such a politics frees one from the beaten tracks of representation to newer vistas.
The intricate and subtle lighting pattern, music and choreography, when she dances in gay abandon towards the climax, blurting out her ferocious love in Tamil, brings forth the hallucinatory world in full force, which carries off the viewer into her world. When she is bursting out in anger for denial of her mobility by patriarchal power of her husband, the ferocious hallucinatory gaze she is aiming at, could be read as fixed at her projections. (A much more systematic study of the techniques deployed is required for a deeper understanding, which demands the technical expertise of a professional film theorist). Likewise, the architectural motifs and it’s positioning in the story , the memory it evokes in various ways, the specificity of music in Indian films as such ( as against its berating in linear progressivism proposed by westernised modernity), its impact in the senses of viewer , are also important and deserves study. Especially so, in the light of Powell’s reading of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s German expressionism in a Deleuzian mould, Indian cinema with its unique relation at it’s birth to German expressionist tradition, than Hollywood real time flicks, which also accounts for its nonlinear flight of fantasy musicals, even in the popular genre , is worth analysis. Thus it would be interesting to think, whether the apparent contradicton of poor masses of India, despite living on a diet of escapist fantasies, spontaneously engaging in radical uprising, can be understood using such a framework.
It is not that cinema can only be studied in a single way .Thus, as has been attempted by Sundar Sarukkai in social sciences, and Sharad patil in his Buddhist project of indigenising Marxism , the uniqueness of Indian film experience can be approached much more fruitfully from various Indian philosophical standpoints, all of which can contribute to the enrichment of the subject.
In addition to this, the fact that the multiplicity of experience registered on the senses , which is internalised in the creation of an intense state of multiplicity, posits possibility of creative madness as liberatory and has it’s repercussions even in the socio political domain. Possibilities are inaugurated by such an approach, where sourcing from cinema, instead of a jaded psycho analytic approach which upholds ahistorical notions of repression, the schizo analysis may also be used to understand the class contradictions ripening even with in the subaltern formations.
On a personal ‘schizoid’ note, my own political persuasion is biased more towards Zizek and Badiou to some extent, which subscribes to universal truths which cinema reveals. Thus scholars like Fleming argues, on the other hand, that in Deleuze thought has no rational system and is underpinned by drift . Yet, I hope such a reading unleashes potential for new possibilities, which may help the left to become a bit more eclectic, reflexive and non eschatological.
As Lawrence Liang and and Golan Naulak, writes in the Hindu, in the after math of xenophobic and racist attack on people from north east in Delhi, “ Gilles Deleuze once remarked that it is better to be a schizophrenic out for a walk than a neurotic on a couch — perhaps a bold imagination of our diversity demands that we be comfortable with our multiple identities if we are not to collapse into the neurosis of the singular”.
Joe M S, is a social science teacher from Kerala. Worked in various places of India, now residing in Ireland.
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