Introduction
Film Studies is a flourishing academic discipline in India. Its significance lies in the dominant place films and film stars occupy in Indian popular culture. Besides, film emerges as a popular medium in which the conscious and unconscious elements in the society gets depicted mostly uncritically. It studies how various aspects of film such as art, entertainment, ideology, technology, industry and audience intersect to produce meaning. In its attempt to mirror the society it represents, films produce layers of meaning, even unintended ones, that demands intensive analysis and interpretation. India as a region has seen many conflicts around the questions of nationality, religion, race, caste, culture and gender. This makes the films produced in India complex in its
representation of people, objects and space.
There are mainly two methods of studying films- the internal criticism that looks at the film form and structure, and the
contextual criticism that examines films in relation to the wider social, political, ideological and historical context. Majority of articles in this edition focus on a contextual criticism of films produced in Kerala.
Afzal in his paper “Imagining the Malayali Nation: Early Malayalam Cinema and the Making of the Modern Malayali
Idenity” explores the role that early Malayalam cinema played in the consolidation of a nascent Malayali linguistic identity. It
discusses the left Left intervention in the field of popular cinema, the relationship among the language politics, left politics and popular cinema. Ann Mary George’s article “The Diegetic Fan: Tracing the evolution of fans in Malayalam Cinema” explores how the fans and their activities are translated and represented within the diegetic space of Malayalam cinema. Her focus is the star-fan relation portrayed in the movies itself. Arunlal K and Sunitha Srinivas’s “The Ugly Scene: Counter-aesthetics and Malayalam Cinema” is a counter aesthetic enquiry into the representations of the variations of the category of ugly in Malayalam cinema. It focuses on the representation of madness and the abject in cinema.
Vipin K in his paper “Family, Sexuality and Class in the Popular Malayalam Cinema of 1980s” looks at select popular
Malayalam films from the 1980s to examine the overlapping of rape or anxieties around sexual deviancy as a significant plot
element. He argues that the sphere of law is one of the important sites for articulating the strained construction of the middle-class family threatened by the intrusions made by various forms of “illegality”. Namitha’s “Portrayal of Masculinity in Malayalam Cinema: A Comparative Study of Great Indian Kitchen and Aarkariyam” does a comparative analysis of the portrayal of male figures in these films from a feminist gaze. CS Venkiteswara’s “What happened to ‘art’ cinema? explores the history of art cinema to trace its trajectory from 70s to the present. Aparna Nandakumar’s “Cuteness” and Androgyny in Neoliberal Kerala: Revisiting the Youth Film Niram” points out the complex inter-relations between the concepts of androgyny, neoliberalism, modernity, and idealism in relation to how youth is imagined in non-metropolitan regions of the world. She focuses on “Cuteness” as a form of androgyny represented in select youth films in Malayalam cinema. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil’s article “The Dangerous Supplement: A revaluation of Sreenivasan and the Malayalam comic film” briefly looks at the thematic elements in some of Sreenivasan’s most memorable roles from the comic film gene of the late 1980s and early 1990s and argues that Sreenivasan provided Malayalam cinema the energies of a fast transforming world. Gopakumar, Renjini and Sudheer. S. Salam in their article “Visualizing subjective experiences of alienation as Imagery of dreams and
hallucination -A psychoanalytic semiological study on select T V Chandran Filmsfocuses on the imagery of dreams and hallucination in signifying the “Concept of Social Alienation in TV Chandran’s Films. Psychoanalytical Semiological review of the film reveals that the director has adroitly used dreams and hallucinations of his characters to create psychosomatic signs for signifying the concept of alienation, and also could overcome the narrative’s impossibility in visualizing the abstract subjective experience of the characters involved in alienation. This Semiological intervention has given the director the flexibility to disrupt the filmic narration to create coherence and meaning to the active viewer, and also could deepen
the concept of alienation in these movies. Priya Chandran and Sreebitha P V’s article, “Nayattu: Fears and Anxieties” critically
analyse the Malayalam film Nayattu and argues that the film reflects the savarna fear of Dalit assertions. Shalini M’s paper, “The Madness of the Method: Unlocking the Ornate Lock” attempts to read “Manichithrathazhu” (The Ornate Lock)” in the context of
women and madness.
