This year, after two years of cancellation due to the pandemic and fresh in the wake of offline college, the Department of English was determined to organize Litmus, our annual academic conference, which finally became a reality in April 2022 with the theme ‘Filmature: Literature, Cinema and the Politics of Representation.’
On 20th April, the Design Team of Jabberwock hosted an intriguing offline exhibition named ‘Aperture’, a precursor to Litmus.
The exhibition was focused on presenting the intricacies of literature and cinema through the lens and the gaze, and to analyze the weight of the director’s chair. Held in the Exhibition hall of the college, it featured a photostory, consisting of black and white film frames, and the filtered yellows that captured the blue skies, red walls and other unspoken stories of Lady Shri Ram College. A board nearby was crowded with film posters from Bollywood, capturing the industry’s journey from evergreen classics like Mother India, Mera Naam Joker, and Sholay, the 90’- early 2000’s era of Chocolate-Boy Romance with films like Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, Kal Ho Na Ho and modern masterworks like Om Shanti Om, and Munna Bhai MBBS.
A bioscope was set up to enlighten the audience with another form of picture form stories, along with paintings from the celebrated Studio Ghibli film, Whisper of the Heart. The movie echoes the fears of budding creators who sometimes dread the idea of losing their ability to create, yet feel an innate voice that motivates them to continue. Another noteworthy display was the visual depiction of feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male Gaze’ theory. The clash of paintings and photographs reflected sexual objectification of women in the media for the heterosexual male, film narratives that display significantly more female complexity and character depth, and how patriarchal notions can be challenged through the depiction of women onscreen. Last but not the least, a camera roll themed photobooth was set up, with eager students lining up for their turn to capture the moment in their own cameras.
This was followed by the much-awaited online Litmus conference on 25th April, which was organized by the English Literary Association in the form of a panel discussion. Filmmakers Shaunak Sen and Anureet Watta were invited as speakers while the session was moderated by Dr. Madhu Grover.
Once the session was declared open by the Union, Dr. Arunima Ray addressed the audience and succinctly introduced the relationship between literature and cinema: no longer to be seen as conflicting entitles, both refashioned. Dr. Madhu Grover continued with a reminder of the link between technology and the way we understand film and representation today before inviting the speakers to comment on the question of authorship. Confronted with ideas of the social and aesthetic, how do we navigate the agency of the filmmaker? While Mr. Sen talked about how these are not mutually exclusive, the different schools of portraying ‘reality’ in film and vesting the sociopolitical with a subtle emotional grammar among other ends, Watta emphasized on the aspirations and ecosystem of a film - for instance, the difference between making films ‘queerly’ and claiming to represent queer people. Dr. Grover took these thoughts in stride, offering her own on the intersection of impersonality or generality and personality.
Their discussion continued in the direction of the economic factors behind producing film, where the two speakers shared several compelling anecdotes. For instance, Watta spoke of their film Kinaara and how film itself becomes a consumer product, waiting to be seen. Mr. Sen admitted to not having to overtly negotiate with it as he spoke of how it is tethered to questions of privilege. Every project is a trojan horse - it has its own context of what, why and how. He expressed his preference for the craft of film and relative disinterest in plot, to which Watta added that it is the plot that mainstream production houses tend to prioritize. Space must be made for ‘smaller’ films. While Watta spoke about how merely focusing on conflict in a film which could instead have multiple platitudes is reductive, Mr. Sen spoke of the creativity that could come from boundary conditions while creating film in the first place.
On the subject of literature and film, the speakers explained how an adaptation is also an extension. One has to figure out what is translatable and to which medium, and the two subjects can be treated the same and still ‘horribly’ different. One also has to be careful not to demarcate the two in too split a universe. The representation of memory, the toolkits, the inflections of language, the link of a screenplay and more come into play. This continued on to the topic of primal symbolisms in film and literature - the subconscious as well as the intentional forming them. From legends and folklore to repressed trauma, the symbolic in film is in a different register than that of literature, aided by the visual with a possibility of preceding language.
As questions from the audience arose, Watta and Mr. Sen spoke of the compartmentalization of film (parallel and mainstream), character consent and privacy in documentaries, psychoanalytic theory, the potential of space today in mises-en-scène, and the audience as a “huge basket of surprises” when it comes to their expectations as compared to how audience expectations are used as a red herring for censorship. On this note, the engaging discussion came to an end.
Dr. Swatie thanked the speakers and organizers of Litmus 2022 before the session formally came to a close. It is without doubt that the entire Department looks forward to the next
Written by Poulomi Deb & Shreya Das