Talking Films Online (TFO), a community of film scholars, researchers and cinephiles came into being in June 2020 during the Covid-induced lockdown. Ever since, we have met online every Saturday at 9 pm, IST to discuss films from all over the world. For the first time in September 2024, we organized an offline event, i.e., an international seminar on “Cinema in the Digital Era: Continuities and Discontinuities” in collaboration with Forum on Contemporary Theory (FCT), Baroda, Gujarat, a centre for interdisciplinary studies. As guest editors of this issue of the journal, we are honoured to present a set of four essays which is an outcome of the proceedings of the seminar. This collection of four scholarly essays indicates a timely exploration of how Indian cinema is being reshaped by digital innovation, gender dynamics, and transforming representational practices. For most Western audiences, it is Hindi cinema popularly known as Bollywood that is synonymous with Indian cinema. In France, the 2023 Bollywood Superstars exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum traced a century of Indian cinema, moving beyond stereotypes to highlight its artistic depth. We attempt to change such a perception by including regional cinema from the Malayalam film industry as well as instances of the emerging trend of independent short films, especially amongst young filmmakers. All papers were peer-reviewed and revised accordingly by the scholars. We are grateful to the reviewers for their time and attention to detail.

For the cinema industry, the pandemic was as much of a watershed moment as it was disruptive. The Over-the-Top (OTT) platforms saw a flood of content created largely due to the demand from homebound populations world over. Competition amongst streaming services such as Prime Video, Netflix, Disney Hotstar, etc. led to the creation of innovative and niche content. Propelled by lenient censorship rules and streaming platforms’ monetization models, homes were inundated with unlimited choices in entertainment. According to globalmediajournal.com,[1] by 2024, digital media outpaced television to become the largest contributor of revenue that led to structural changes in the media industry. The shift from analogue to digital has revolutionized the fields of filmmaking, photography, telecom, sound, and the universe of information systems. Digital devices such as Smartphones are used by over one billion users for watching as well as making films. AI tools have reduced production costs by almost 30%, making it possible for amateur and independent filmmakers to enter the field. The resultant entry of new voices, as we shall see in this collection, has led to inclusivity in cinematic narratives. This moment of experimentation resonates with the spirit of the French New Wave right up to contemporary feminist filmmakers like Céline Sciamma.

TFO chose the seminar theme with the aim of mapping such changes in the production, distribution, exhibition, and reception of cinema on to the altered and still altering media ecosystem. For instance, small budget films such as The Great Indian Kitchen (Malayalam, 2021) that echoes European feminist works like Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, and Ramprasad ki Tehrvi (Hindi, 2021) have gained critical and commercial success in recent years. A major shift has occurred in the exponential growth of cinema in languages such as Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu, accounting for over 60% of India’s film output. Dubbing and subtitling has facilitated the expanded reach of this cinema nationally and internationally. Thus, big budget films, driven by star power (RRR, Telugu, 2022) and (KGF: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, Kannada, 2022) became pan-India hits making dubbing and subtitling de rigueur.

It is in this context that Fabienne Le Houerou’s essay, “Digital Revolution in Filmmaking in India and the Democratic Challenge” in this anthology of four papers gains tremendous significance. It offers an intriguing combination of the personal and the philosophical alongside concrete evidences from the short films curated for the Smartphone Short Filmmaking Contest organised by TFO. Using the intellectually rich conceptual frame of the rhizome, provided by Deleuze, she demonstrates the democratizing tendencies of digital filmmaking through the online community of TFO as her case study. While the observation about smartphones being valuable tools for the equalizing of opportunities is appropriate, Le Houerou argues that the digital media is particularly empowering for women. This observation is evidenced by an increased visibility of women behind the camera. The global recognition of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light that won the Grand Prix in 2024 shifted the gaze on to women filmmakers and female-character-driven stories. The category of gender receives distinctive attention in Le Houerou’s essay that aids in the deepening of the essay’s pertinence to our connected times. Her own grounding in the theory and practice of filmmaking shines new light on the paper, giving it a personal and authentic perspective. For European readers familiar with the Dogme 95 movement’s minimalist rebellion, this essay highlights a similar disruption, although it is different from Dogme 95 in that it valorises India’s vast digital infrastructure as opposed to Dogme’s upholding of purer forms of storytelling untarnished by technology.[2]

Like Le Houerou, Sharad Raj is also a filmmaker. His essay, “Plan 199, Cultural Inclusivity, Politics, Production and Mise-En-scene in the Digital Era,” provides a practitioner’s viewpoint on how digital ecosystems augment inclusivity and restructure cinematic form. Outlining the influence of modernism and globalization, Sharad Raj argues that digital tools empower the filmmaker to represent diverse themes such as disability, and resurrect regional identities in a largely hegemonic system of mainstream Hindi cinema used as a shorthand for Indian cinema.  

Sweeping across a wide canvas from the scholarly weight of Nietzsche, Benjamin and Adorno to the currently popular exhibition platforms like Netflix, Sharad Raj’s paper examines the effect of globalization, capitalism, and digital exhibition platforms on Indian cinema. Connecting the Nietzschean notion of the “death of God”[3] to Kieslowski’s “death of cinema”[4] within the tropes of industrialization, globalization, and digitalization, he stresses the role of cinema as an artistic and political tool. He posits that while modernist cinema (by Indian auteurs such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mani Kaul, and the European auteurs) is thematically unconventional, formally experimental, and anti-establishment, postmodernist cultural artefacts celebrate pluralism and pastiche. Nonetheless, modernist cinema exemplifies Jameson and Žižek’s critiques of late capitalism through the tendency towards reification and kitsch.

To problematize what often gets seen as the inclusive tendencies of digital cinema, Sharad Raj analyses three films; Jhund (Manjule, 2022), Badhai Do (Kulkarni, 2022), and Lapata Ladies (Kiran Rao, 2023). The first, although a Dalit narrative, ends up being incorporated into the mainstream contrasting with his earlier, more rebellious Fandry (Manjule, 2013). The second film made in the comic mode represents the LGBT community; yet lacks a deeper political engagement. The third film which went on to become a major commercial success was advertised as a feminist film. However, Sharad Raj argues that the narrative is driven by the privileged gaze of the urban outsider. Thus, contemporary digital cinema’s cultural inclusivity comes at the cost of a radical aesthetic and political engagement. 

No film analysis is complete without a thoroughgoing analysis of the category of gender. Gender is deeply imbricated in the tropes of nation,[5] caste, class, region, and identity. Cinema from its beginnings has been a site for reflecting and challenging prevalent social norms. Femininity was represented through stereotypes of sacrificial mother, dutiful wife and the like, while masculinity was foregrounded through strong males whose actions drove the plot of the film.[6] As Virdi points out, “Women in Hindi films are often positioned as the repositories of cultural values, embodying tradition in contrast to men who symbolize modernity.”[7] However, parallel cinema, as epitomized by filmmakers such as Shyam Benegal, Deepa Mehta and more recently, Alankrita Shrivastava, showed the promise of resistance and posed a challenge to such naïve and simplistic paradigmatic projections of the male and the female.

Malayalam cinema coming out of the southern-most state of India has had a long and intricate relationship with gender. Known more for its social realistic narratives than spectacle and melodrama, women have occupied a significant part of the film embodying progressive values. As early as 1965, the film Chemeen (Shrimps) navigated the dense terrain of woman’s desire vs societal norms. Malayalam cinema produced some classics that showed a sharp political consciousness and explored societal hierarchies in the 1980s through the works of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, and later, Shaji N. Karun. In the recent past, films like Uyare (Manu Ashokan, 2019) and The Great Indian Kitchen (R Kannan, 2021) put women’s subjectivities on the centre stage. Thus, Malayalam cinema is a fecund ground for investigating the negotiations of gender.

The controversy around the sexual assault case of a female actor by a prominent male star in 2017 that resulted in the formation of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC)[8] and the Hema Committee Report (2024)[9] is the context in which Malavika Ajikumar locates her discussion of Sara’s (Jude Anthany Joseph, 2021). The Report brought to light the systemic sexual harassment and discrimination of women in the film industry. The article is a nuanced intervention in the study of gender politics in Malayalam cinema, as it explore the film industry through its female protagonist, who is a filmmaker. Ajikumar focuses her attention on a single film that deals with the problematic themes of reproductive rights and sexual autonomy. The progressive narrative of Sara’s is centred around the under-explored subject of abortion and a woman’s right over her own body. The film traces Sara’s journey as she steers through the quagmire of societal pressures on a woman’s duty to bear and raise children. The film challenges the notion that a woman’s identity primarily is woven around motherhood. Although Indian law asserts the autonomy of the woman and grants her the agency to choose abortion, the cultural environment currently is unconducive to such liberal thought.

However, her concern is not so much with the debate around abortion as it about the figure of the aspirational female filmmaker. Given that the auteur has conventionally been imagined as male, what may be the implications of a female auteur who from time immemorial has been marginalized within the industry as well as in academic renderings of film histories? Ajikumar raises an intriguing question about the mode of reception of the film. She notes that OTT platforms have to a large extent changed the dynamics of film production and reception. It has also seen a growth of the number of women technicians in filmmaking. This has given rise to increased visibility for women and non-binary sections of society in the cinematic narratives. Therefore, she concludes that a film such as Sara’s that depicts gender is non-conformist and transgressive ways could be made only because it was released on OTT, the audience being what she calls, ‘technologically evolved’ and therefore likely to be aware of the politics of representation. The shift in creation and consumption of content in the era of OTT also fosters individualistic readings of films, she concludes.

The sheer increased output of content has expanded the thematic possibilities of cinema. Films are no longer restricted to the grand themes of love, war and moral dilemmas. On the contrary, they have begun to explore the ordinary lives of diverse segments of the populations. The proliferation of images and videos of food, for instance, that circulate on platforms such as Instagram has provided ample fodder in our contemporary times to the independent branch of study called food studies within the umbrella disciplines of social sciences and cultural studies. Food being a multi-sensory experience has immense potential for cinematic representation. Scholars in the field have argued that food has symbolic value and is a prominent signifier of identity-formation. Sidney Mintz, an American anthropologist is generally considered a pioneer in the field of food anthropology. His foundational book, Sweetness and Power traces the history of the production and consumption of sugar linking it to slavery, colonialism and capitalism.[10] Pierre Bourdieu’s work has been widely applied to the study of food cultures.  Going beyond the materiality of food, Bourdieu discusses the value of the gustatory sense in marking the social class of a person. His concept of ‘habitus,’ that is to say, a set of learned behaviours that are embedded in our consciousness, is a significant contribution to our understanding of the intersections of food and class, by extension gender and caste. Thus, the choices we make in our eating habits reflect the social class we belong to.[11]  In the process, taste is analysed not as an objective category but as a marker of power. Bourdieu posits that the ones with cultural capital decide notions of good and bad taste. KT Achaya’s Indian Food: A Historical Companion and A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food is a foundational text in Indian food history. Citing ancient texts, he connects different culinary practices and customs to topography, trade and culture.[12] Arjun Appadurai also locates his study of global food movements in the larger rubric of culture. Focussing on India, he explores the role of cookbooks in the construction of national identity.[13] Like Bourdieu, Appadurai’s essay reveals the importance of reading food as an area of inquiry that criss-crosses with class, gender and in the Indian context, caste as well.

In this collection, Sanjay Kumar’s paper deftly combines theoretical insights from Eagleton, Bower, Lindenfeld, and Parasecoli with close readings of the cinematic texts. The two films The Lunchbox and Photograph are posited as offering the metaphor of food in their narratives as distinctly different from each other. The former is a food-centric film, while the latter uses food as a symbol. The analysis expands the ordinariness of the acts of eating and cooking into a critique of larger societal structures of class, gender and the framing of domestic labour as without worth. The author seems to raise questions of food as a substitute for failed intimacy, as Eagleton suggests in an increasingly alienating urban world. For French audiences familiar with the symbolic centrality of food in films like Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987), Batra’s urban stories are centred around identifiable themes of connection and isolation, accentuated by digital distribution on global platforms.

Read together, this collection alerts film scholars and practitioners to the challenges posed by and the possibilities of the emerging technologies of the rapidly developing digital media. They offer insights into the altered robustness of media space. Digital media is largely seen as an empowering and transformative force in so far as its reach and democratizing tendencies are concerned. The consensus is that while there has been more visibility for marginal groups, there is still a lot to achieve in terms of real time change in the material world. So far as critical reading of cinema goes, this collection seems to suggest that the only way forward is to move towards a plural understanding of the contemporary as this historical moment is one of simultaneity (coexistence of past-present-future) and multiplicity (diversity of content and form). Henry Jenkins’s concept of “convergence culture”[14] provides a useful theoretical frame here. Convergence, to Jenkins, does not happen merely at the level of the technological but also cultural. Audiences today move between streaming platforms driven by the easy flow of content across multiple delivery systems. This collection demonstrates how convergence operates within Indian cinema at several levels: the convergence of daily practices (food, reproduction) with political structures (patriarchy, democracy), and the conjunction of traditional cinematic forms with new digital possibilities.

 Notes

[1] An open-access peer-reviewed publication that focuses on international, intercultural, and mass communication. https://www.globalmediajournal.com

[2] Dogme 95 was founded in 1995, in Paris by two Danish directors: Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Frustrated with what they saw as increasingly artificial, effects-laden, and director-centric films, they literally stormed a conference celebrating cinema’s 100th anniversary, showering the audience with pamphlets containing their manifesto. The manifesto declared that film had become ‘ill’ with cosmeticism and illusion, and suggested a ‘Vow of Chastity’ (kyskhedsløfter), a set of ten strict rules that filmmakers had to swear to follow to create a « Dogme » film including location shooting, sound captured during shooting, and not through dubbing, post-production and non-diegetic sound, use of hand-held camera etc.

[3] To Nietzsche the belief in the Christian God was in itself untenable as everything that was built upon this faith, including the whole European morality had collapsed. Hence, his belief that God is dead. (Anderson, R. Lanier Friedrich Nietzsche, 2017, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University – via plato.stanford.edu.).

[4] Kieslowski, the Polish auteur did not exactly declare the death of cinema. What he meant was that cinema as an intimate art form that explored fundamental human dilemmas had ceased to exist with the rise of Hollywood and the concomitant commercialization of this art form.

[5] Sumita Chakravarty’s work is an early intervention in studies of the intersections of gender and nation. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987. USA: University of Texas Press, 1993.

[6] Gokulsing, K. Moti, and Wimal Dissanayake. Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change. UK: Trentham Books, 2004. This important book demonstrates the shifts in masculinity and femininity in Indian cinema across a wide historical period.

[7] Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003: 12.

[8] WCC works towards building a safe, non-discriminatory and professional workspace for women in cinema through advocacy and policy change (https://wccollective.org/about).

[9] The Justice Hema Committee was an advisory committee formed by the Kerala government in 2017. It was chaired by Justice (Retd.) Hema with film actor and politician Sarada and former bureaucrat Vatsalakumari as its other members, and was tasked with studying the status of women in the Malayalam film industry. The committee’s report, submitted in 2019, highlighted systemic gender inequality, including major pay disparities, the lack of safe working environments, and the absence of mechanisms to address harassment. It provided a comprehensive set of guidelines to ensure equal rights, safety, and dignity for women in the industry. (Source: The official report of the « Committee for Women in Malayalam Cinema, » Government of Kerala, 2019. On 19 August 2024, the report became public after the Kerala High Court, upheld the order of the State Information Commission and allowed for the release of the Justice Hema Committee report.

[10] Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 1986.

[11] Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge, 2010.

[12] Achaya, K. T., Indian food: A Historical Companion. Oxford University Press, 1998.

[13] Appadurai, Arjun. “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. Cambridge University Press, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan. 1988), pp. 3-24.

[14] Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.