Elsewheres of Desire: Indian Cinematic Landscapes as Spaces of Transition
Debjani Mukherjee
Publication: Volume 4 Issue 3
Abstract | Contemporary Indian popular cinema has undergone a radical thematic and aesthetic shift with the arrival of the multiplex as a cinematic exhibition space. The multiplex first appeared in India in 1997, its spaces becoming entwined with the narrative of the urban transformation of India’s metropolitan cities in the image of global urban spaces. The multiplex screen too has become an extension of this desire for transformation, its cinematic space charged with the frisson of an expanded geographical imagination. This psychogeography of an elsewhere that appears on multiplex screens thus opens up a spatial imaginary that is composite of a more expansive terrain of possibilities, enabling us to see where “we” are not. This paper examines two films, Shanghai (2012) and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (ZNMD) (2011), exploring the contrasting ways in which they frame and narrativize their respective landscapes to unfold this desire of an elsewhere. Shanghai is set in the fictitious city of Bharat Nagar in contemporary India, its narrative revolving around the desire to rebuild Bharat Nagar into another Shanghai, while ZNMD, with its protagonists on a road trip, is set mostly in Spain. Shanghai and Spain may be real places with geographical markers, but they are also elsewheres, their locatedness in reality fueling their potency as topographies of the mind. This paper explores how the spaces of Shanghai and ZNMD—one desolate and marginal, and the other transfused with movement and vitality—are spaces of potentiality, functioning as doorways to the imagined, offering in their affective potency the opportunity of transformation.
Keywords | Indian Cinema, Exhibition Space, Multiplex Theatres, Film Exhibition, Cinematic Landscape, Globalization, Film Aesthetics, Liminality, Psychogeographical Imagination, Foucault, Heterotopia, Transformation, Consumerism
Debjani Mukherjee (dmuk338@aucklanduni.ac.nz) is an independent scholar and a documentary filmmaker who runs her own independent production company Red Earth Media. She received her PhD from the University of Auckland in 2017 in Media and Communication. She also holds a postgraduate diploma in Film Direction from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata, India. Her research focuses on the phenomenology, aesthetics and reception of film, and the architectural and sociological aspects of cinematic exhibition spaces. Her other areas of interest include the intersection between environment, activism, and media, specifically how nature is mediated in the global south.