105. Robin Xavier

Abstract 105
Robin Xavier     

The (Counter)Politics of the Post(modern) Cinema: Class, (Con)Texts and the Real in Ee Adutha Kalathu

Abstract

The paper entitled “The (Counter)Politics of the Post(modern) Cinema: Class, (Con)Texts and the Real in Ee Adutha Kalathu” investigates the changed aesthetics and the unchanged politics of (the recent) Malayalam cinema which is referred to as ‘New Wave’ and ‘Postmodern’ alternatively by the movie critics. Cinema of dissent - as these movies are praised by cine critics - in Malayalam is a camouflage, it is argued, for the celebration of the globalized/Neoliberal politics.

Cinema is a site where identities are constructed, boundaries are drawn and redrawn and the ethnic/gender/caste/class differences are established. As it is the space where myths about cultural difference are produced, reproduced, and represented, conversely speaking, it is a discourse of power, following the grammar of (critical) theory. Behind every representation, however, there is a structure of power (often) buried in the unconscious of the text which problematizes the surface text of love, humour, sex and stunt. It is in this context and platform that the notion of postmodern cinema emerges a contestable locale in Malluwood.  

Arun Kumar Aravind’s Ee Adutha Kalathu is a quintessentially postmodernist film in that it is consciously postmodern, unlike many other films that may have postmodem elements but are accidentally postmodern, so to speak. The postmodern in Malluwood is characterised by the presence of the non-linear narratives which break the chronological flow and thereby the firm certitude in the fixed epistemological quest unlike in the cinematic discourses of the past. Rajesh Pillai’s Traffic (2011), Lijo Jose Pellisseri’s City of God (2011), Aashiq Abu’s Salt n Pepper (2011) and V. K. Prakash’s Beautiful (2011) are some of these discourses in which the metaphysics of power and logic of essentialism are subverted to the cancellation of boundaries. The aesthetics of the film disseminates the notion of pastiche, Bakhtinian carnivalization, self-reflexivity and the blurring of the distinction between low and high art. Such an apparent questioning of the structure of power anchor a new aesthetics of dissent pitted against that of the bourgeois realist and avant-garde modernist cinemas.

The text of Ee Adutha Kalathu poses problematic questions regarding the representations, evaluated in the light of discourses of gender, class, caste and ethnicity. The postmodern in Malluwood, seen through these ideological lenses, fails to be a liberating ideology. In the vestige of multiple narrators and plural ideologies, a product that is hypothetically supposed to satisfy the consumers is supplied in the market. It simply becomes a cover up for the destereotyping; but the ideological content simply fails to impress.