Postcolonial films

 

Hello friends,

Postcolonial theory has hardly been a defining example in the field of film studies. Postcolonial theory originally emerged from comparative literature departments and film from film and media studies departments, and despite the many connections postcolonial theory has not been explicitly foregrounded. However, there are more similarities and natural points of intersections between the two areas than it would at first appear.

Colonial images of gender, race, and class carried ideological connotations that confirmed imperial epistemologies and racial taxonomies, depicting natives, in documentary or fictional films, as savages, primitive, and outside modernity. More recent cinema genres such as border cinema, transnational cinema, accented cinema, haptic cinema, migrant cinema, diasporic cinema, and world cinema can be considered affiliated with the postcolonial paradigm as they all embrace ethnic, immigrant, hyphenated counter-narratives. Yet the field of postcolonial cinema studies, which relates postcolonial theory to film, is a false friend to all these categories as it connects with but also departs from the projects they name in order to pursue the tense power asymmetries generated by the legacies of conquest and colonialism.

Postcolonial theory focuses on the critique of empire and its aftermath.

As such, it draws from different disciplinary fields such as literature, media, anthropology, politics, philosophy, gender, and sociology. 

Postcolonial studies is a vast, interdisciplinary field, primarily, concerned with the colonial past as well as postcolonial identity. One interesting area from a postcolonial studies perspective is to relate these issues to implicated power relations between former colonizer and former colonized.

This blog discusses two of these post colonial films, 'Midnight's Children' and 'Reluctant Fundamentalist'

Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), remains a central text in postcolonial literature. Rushdie’s ambitious novel rejects the British colonial versions of India and constructs a ‘new’ world and a new depiction of Indian citizens and history in an attempt to provide greater truth to Indian images and history. Midnight’s Children follows Saleem Sinai, the novel’s narrator, as he self-consciously explains his family history to the reader and to his listener, Padma. While describing his grandfather and grandmother’s personal history, Saleem intertwines Indian history within his narrative. This combination of his own familial history and Indian history culminates in the moment of his birth.

Within the framework which magical realism provides, the novel’s cultural and social hybridity, depicted through the cultural and character diversity within the novel, allows new images of colonial and postcolonial Indian citizens to emerge. As the characters become hybridized socially, through their shifting relationships with each other, the characters alter and change. Through these character interactions and subsequent character changes, the novel depicts societal shifts and historical changes. The relationships between the other “midnight’s children,” with whom Saleem is able to communicate with, alter after these children learn their parents’ religious and traditional beliefs.

The narrator and central character famously remarks:

"I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country."

He and his peers are given special powers (prophecy, magic, metamorphosis) in exchange for terrible responsibilities, and they become the embodiment of the best hope of the two nations during a period of bad faith, violence and the betrayal of democracy. 

The film, directed by Deepa Mehta is stunning to watch. Between the colorful textiles and the lush landscapes, the elephants on parade and the stilt walkers, “Midnight’s Children” is a visual treat.

The plot, however, feels like a mad, was trying to shoehorn every single storyline from novel into the film. During the second half of the movie, narrative switchbacks arrive at breakneck speed, and the whole endeavor starts to feel exhausting. A viewer might begin to wonder what new calamity could possibly befall these poor kids.

It’s all the more confounding given that the first half hour or more is devoted to the leisurely unfolding histories of Saleem’s parents and grandparents. The complex lineage makes interesting fodder for the novel, but when time is of the essence, cuts must be made. The superfluous back story comes at the cost of fully realized narrative arcs for the film’s title characters.

“The Reluctant Fundamentalist”

 

It’s a double meaning to the title of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” filmmaker Mira Nair’s great, mesmerizing and complex drama.

Looking from surface level, “fundamentalist” refers to religious identity, one unfortunately most often associated with Islamic terrorism these days. Film is about an ambitious, Pakistani-born Wall Street financial analyst who becomes disenchanted with the United States after 9/11 — certainly suggests that most obvious reading. In that interpretation, the reluctant fundamentalist is an assimilated Muslim forced into anti-American radicalism by America itself.

So, does the uncertainty of the title refer to the brutal Western capitalist or to the idealistic yet puritanical Pakistani?

As the identities of the two men become more knotty, however, they also become more trapped with each other. Although there are times when the movie drags a bit because of all the flashbacks, it mostly maintains a steady forward momentum, chugging toward its exciting, unstable climax.

Thank You.

 

 

 

 

References:

“Film Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist (15).” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 9 May 2013, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/film-review-reluctant-fundamentalist-15-8609955.html.

Ponzanesi, Sandra. Postcolonial Theory in Film. www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo-9780199791286-0284.xml.

Saltz, Rachel. “Birth of a Nation, in the Words of Salman Rushdie.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Apr. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/movies/midnights-children-adaptation-of-salman-rushdies-novel.html?_r=0.