Welcome Readers,
The Postcolonial theory centres around the evaluation of the dominant colonial empire and its consequence on the natives. Some of the most influential postcolonial ideas emerged in form of literature that penetrated deeper into the aftermath of colonial rule as a critique of it. It is widely believed that Literature and more particularly Films reflect culture. But in the case of postcolonialism, the continents which were under the surveillance of colonial rule faced a huge amount of misinterpretation or misreading of the native culture under the influence of universalism. One huge impact of postcolonial analysis is to subvert the universalist claims once made on behalf of literature by liberal humanist critics.
Postcolonial theory has hardly been a defining paradigm in the field of film studies. The postcolonial theory originally emerged from comparative literature departments and film from film and media studies departments, and despite the many intersections, postcolonial theory has not been explicitly foregrounded. However, there are more similarities and natural points of intersections between the two areas than it would at first appear. For example, both postcolonial theory and film studies emerged at the end of the 1970s with the development of semiotic theory and poststructuralist thought.
Postcolonial cinema has much in common with the multiple layers and connotations which features subjectivities emerging between national identities and political circumstances. And, like these porous categories, the "postcolonial" rubric is intended to counteract the ghettoization of films (as "ethnic." "minority," "immigrant," "hyphenated," or even "art-house") that depart from commercial and ideological hegemonies. Yet postcolonial cinema remains a strange false friend of these categories as it connects with, but also departs from the projects they name to pursue questions of the tense power asymmetries bequeathed to the contemporary world by the multiple, diverse, and overlapping histories of conquest and colonialism. Characters, images, and narratives move across and between contingent histories and geographies, which the temporal and spatial malleability of cinema actualizes in powerfully effective ways. (Ponzanesi)
This blog is a task assigned by my professor to reflect the interpretations of the below-mentioned films related to the themes of Postcolonial studies. All the films are very interesting sites for cultural and postcolonial studies of looking at critically acclaimed texts.
1) Midnight's Children
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Produced by: David Hamilton, Dough Mankoff Steven Silver, Neil Tabatznik, Andrew Spaulding. Screenplay: Salman Rushdie Based on: Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie Starring: Shriya Saran Shabana Azmi Ronit Roy Satya Bhabha Anupam Kher Siddharth Narayana Rahul Bose Darsheel Safari Seema Biswas Cinematography: Giles Nuttgens Edited by: Colin Monie Distributed by: Mongrel Release date: 9 September 2012 (Toronto International Film Festival) Running time: 148 minutes Language: English/ Hindi/ Bengali |
Midnight's Children 2013 film is based on one of the most acclaimed novels 'Midnight's Children' by Salman Rushdie. It is about the lives of two people conceived at the stroke of 12 PM when India accomplished its autonomy from the British. The unbelievable yet sensational Midnight's Children film includes an incredible story that marks it as an epic adventure of the decade. This film takes us through all the ages starting from the grandparents to the grandkids. Exchanged at the hour of birth by a medical caretaker at a Bombay hospital, the lives of the two people are bafflingly interwoven. As destiny would have it, one (Saleem) is a child of a homeless person lady though the other kid (Shiva) turns into the ordained child of an affluent couple. Throughout some undefined time frame, their destiny makes them face each other in the field of rivalry, governmental issues, sentiment, and class.
Midnight's Children is a fake life account in which individual sham and political authenticity are intertwined. May it be because it just wants to break down into possibility and idiocy. Its storyteller, Saleem Sinai, consolidates the account of his own adolescence with that of India itself, having been conceived at 12 PM (midnight) upon the arrival of India's freedom from British colonization. Saleem attests,
'To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world',
and this flexible novel twangs charmingly every which way to incorporate its storyteller and his family members, just as the country and its occupants. The refracted and twisting way to deal with the account is mirrored in the actual type of the storyteller himself. There is no grotesquery with which Rushdie doesn't supply Saleem: he has bulbous sanctuaries, an uncovered recognize, a colossal nose and a touch of his finger is absent. His self-mythologisation, as he concedes, can without much of a stretch be perused as the vengeance fantasy of nobody, especially when Saleem portrays being at a school dance where all the mainstream young men, incorporating one with the last name Rushdie, get the best dance accomplices.
Despite his inadequacies as a student of history, Saleem is gladly a storyteller from the TV and film age, offering drama style traces of what's to come. He has dominated the most shocking and agreeable narrating expressions: the 'generalised macrocosmic’' mode fusing
'matter of fact descriptions of the outré and bizarre, and their reverse, namely heightened, stylized versions of everyday'.
His family's fortunes are portrayed utilizing the set pieces, wide droll, quick activity and exaggerated feelings of the standard Indian film hit. Rushdie makes this methodology express, comparing a writer's interpretation of history to the experience of sitting far enough back at the film for the picture on-screen to be most clear: 'the further you get from the past, the more concrete and conceivable it appears'. In one of the novel's endless and clear incongruities, Saleem's own uncle is a screenwriter resolved to reestablish passionate nuance and communist authenticity to the Indian screen.
At its general sense, Midnight's Children is an investigation of the outcome of expansionism, as Saleem's family move from the pre-Partition Kashmiri valley to Amritsar, Agra, Delhi, Bombay, Pakistan and back. The brutality and hardness of provincial abuse is clarified in a depiction of 1947 similar to the year a
'soldier’s knife … cut a subcontinent in three'.
The enduring which remains is reflected in the rehashed picture of an urgently arriving nearby. The hand shows up in the bloodlike betel juice spat out by men in the city, the burned rubbish of an incendiarism assault by a mafia-style nearby political gathering and in
‘the handlike peninsula’
of India's pre-colonial geography. Then, subtler impacts like the disguise of frontier prejudice are reflected in the Indian characters' abhorrence of more obscure skin, the emblematic expansion in vitiligo (the skin infection which filters colour from the skin and turns it white) after Independence, and the requirement that new Indian occupants of a former coloniser’s estate must live surrounded by the interloper’s old possessions. (An introduction to Midnight’s Children)
Though a bit literal for a film that traffics in magical realism, Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children is both dreamy and dramatic, a fascinating view of Indian history seen through the prism of a personal — and occasionally twinned — story.
2) The Reluctant Fundamentalist:
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Directed by: Meera Nair Produced by: Lydia Dean Pilcher Screenplay by: William Wheeler Rutvik Oza Story by: Mohsin Hamid, Ami Boghani Based on: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid Starring: Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson Liv Schreiber Meesha Shafi Kiefer Sutherland Om Puri Shabana Azmi Cinematography: Declan Quinn Edited by: Shimit Amin Release date: 29 August 2012 (Venice Film Festival) 26 April 2013 (United States) 24 May 2013 (Pakistan) Running time: 130 minutes |
Adapted from Moshin Hamid's novel on the same title, the fortunes of a young Pakistani student, Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed), son of an esteemed poet and intellectual, as he wanders into Western culture and, essentially, the awful universe of corporate capitalism. Business is battle and this is shown at its best yet Khan's sharp keenness and mental ability before long bring him rewards and, after graduation from Princeton, glory with Underwood Sampson, a worldwide valuation firm situated in New York.
There, his fortune advances wonderfully. He is socially skilled, involves with a lady and achieves all the heights of as a young man before the breaking point. At that point, out of that sky show up the commandeered aircraft that changed history on September 11, 2001. It not only changed the course of the Islamic identities in America only but it changed the perception of the whole world towards a particular community as associated with terrorism. Just because of a few people's criminal deeds, the whole community is still facing the powerfully terrible prejudices.
Getting back to NYC from Manila, Changez is strip-looked at the air terminal and further mortified as unsteady security specialists catch, ham-fistedly, with the new reality. He earnestly appreciates America's financial opportunities, its advancement and he savours exciting and fun living.
Equally, he deplores terrorism and the jihadist mindset but as his circumstances twist and tighten he becomes a person of interest to the CIA and its various clones. It soon becomes apparent there's not much difference, really, between the imperatives of Muslim fundamentalists and the rationalist market capitalists he works for. Changez clings to his belief of a level playing field, a fair goes and the nobility of his heritage yet is forced to confront a terrible schism in the realities of that outlook. (Anderson, D.)
Liev Schreiber plays Bobby Lincoln, the CIA's go-to person in Lahore (in the appearance of a columnist), examining assailant understudies associated with seizing an American scholarly. Kiefer Sutherland is Changez's supervisor at Underwood Sampson and Kate Hudson plays Erica — the Big Apple society snapper whose adoration for Khan, at last, establishes another component of betrayal.
"The world changed on 9/11" was a phrase we used to hear all the time. The film left a wondering effect that we were compelled to re-evaluate our own individual paths or modify our moral and political priorities during the long wars in the years that followed. (Mozaffar)
3) Kavi Raz's The Black Prince:
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Produced by: Brillstein Entertainment Partners Starring: Satinder Sartaj Amanda Root Jason Flemyng Atul Sharma Rup Magon Cinematography: Aaron C. Smith Release date: 21 July 2017 (worldwide) Running time: 118 min Country: India, United Kingdom, United States Language: English, Hindi, Punjabi |
4) Stephan Frears' Victoria and Abdul
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Produced by: Tim Bevan Eric Fellner Beeban Kidron Tracy Seaward Screenplay by: Lee Hall Based on: Victoria and Abdul by Sharbani Basu Starring: Judi Dench Ali Fazal Eddie Izzard Adeel Akhtar Paul Higgins Cinematography: Danny Cohen Edited by: Melanie Ann Oliver Production Company: BBC Films Perfect World Pictures Working Title Films Cross Street Films Language: English |
Victoria and Abdul is a 2017 British anecdotal comedy movie. The film depends on the book of a similar name by Shrabani Basu, about the genuine connection between Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and her Indian Muslim servant Abdul Karim. It depicts the postcolonial account of hoe the process of servitude is generated in the subject's mind. It is all about-
How the east and west are meeting?
How they all portray each other?
Works Cited
Anderson, Doug. "Movie Of The Week: The Reluctant Fundamentalist". The Sydney Morning Herald, 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movie-of-the-week-the-reluctant-fundamentalist-20160420-gobae4.html. Accessed 18 Nov 2020.
"An Introduction To Midnight’S Children". The British Library, 2020, https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-midnights-children. Accessed 18 Nov 2020.
"Birth Of A Nation, In The Words Of Salman Rushdie (Published 2013)". Nytimes.Com, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/movies/midnights-children-adaptation-of-salman-rushdies-novel.html?_r=0. Accessed 18 Nov 2020.
"Huffpost Is Now A Part Of Verizon Media". Huffpost.Com, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/movie-review-imidnights-c_b_3153638?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in. Accessed 18 Nov 2020.
Mozaffar, Omer. "The Reluctant Fundamentalist Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert". Rogerebert.Com, 2013, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-reluctant-fundamentalist-2013. Accessed 18 Nov 2020.
Ponzanesi, Sandra. Postcolonial Theory in Film. 22 February 2018. Webpage. 18 November 2020. <https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo-9780199791286-0284.xml>.
Ponzanesi, Sandra, and Marguerite Waller, eds. Postcolonial cinema studies. Routledge, 2012. Hard Copy. 18 November 2020.
Thank you.
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