Author: Nori, Gauri
Publication Year: 2022
Keywords: thesis
Abstract: This thesis develops a critical discourse analysis of contemporary avant-garde filmmaking in India. It engages with the constantly evolving discursiveness of the avant-garde, as an intellectual and artistic practice, to argue for a phenomenology of film aesthetics. Drawing from a detailed consideration of the historical and geopolitical conditionalities of the avant-garde in the west and in India, the thesis contends for the primacy of phenomenology both as a method of analysing films, and as an aesthetic practice of experimental filmmaking. The contemporary position of the avant-garde is then delineated through thick descriptive analysis of the films by Vipin Vijay, Amit Dutta and Ashish Avikunthak to demonstrate and instantiate a phenomenology of film aesthetics. This mixed-method approach broadens this research beyond identifying the intellectual modalities of the filmmakers, towards a deeper engagement with the embodied and intersubjective relationships that are formed within the cinematic experience. Through a rigorous media archaeology, a reflexive critique of the scopic preoccupations of western aesthetics, and a phenomenology of historical affect, the radical propensity of these films elicits future trajectories of cinematic practice.
Vanguardism of film art provides a fertile ground for deliberating on the institutional entanglements of cinema. While the aesthetics of concealment propagated by classical narrative cinema sought to enforce a false sense of stability to film art, avant-garde cinema has actively drawn attention to the virtuality of the medium. The shift to the digital era has also highlighted the immersive and experiential aspects of cinema that have long eluded the rationalist frameworks of analysis. This has provoked a turn in film studies towards alternate paradigms, such as that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological investigations into the nature of perception. Developing from this understanding, the thesis explores the intellectual, experiential, and film aesthetic possibilities triggered by film experiments in a digital era. In tracing the potential that the contemporary moment holds, this thesis posits the digital era avant-garde cinema from India as a phenomenology of film aesthetics.
To critique the historical discourse of the avant-garde and overcome its inherent contradictions, this thesis benefits from a phenomenological approach that is sensitive to the nuances of radical film practices that have emerged from non-western contexts. In this regard, the digital has proved to be an apt vantage point from which previously foreclosed trajectories of cinema could once again be revisited. Further, this thesis points to the phenomenological bent of avant-garde films based on their self-reflexive awareness. Hence, the thesis not only stages a phenomenology of avant-garde cinema but also seeks to affirm the significance of contemporary cinematic vanguardism from India as a phenomenology of film aesthetics.
Following an introduction to the research, the second chapter brings together the historical discourse of the avant-garde, the advent of the digital and the turn to film phenomenology, to assert the experiential modalities of this practice. The third chapter explores radical film practices in India that disrupt the linear and predominantly western conception of cinematic vanguardism. Through thick descriptions, the fourth chapter remains alert to the aesthetic treatment of historical affect in the avant-garde films of Vipin Vijay, Amit Dutta and Ashish Avikunthak. In mapping avant-garde discourse, the conclusion examines the implications of proposing digital era avant-garde cinema in India as a phenomenology of film aesthetics.
University: The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad
Shodh Ganga Link: View Thesis
Category: Film Studies
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