Abstract
The theory of male gaze was first introduced by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ According to Mulvey (Screen 16: 6–18, 1975), cinema reflects the oblivion of patriarchal society and reinforces the notion that women are the subject of heterosexual male control and desire (Superson in Hypatia 26: 410–418, 2011). The function of cinema, according to Laura Mulvey, is to serve as a voyeuristic medium that encourages the audience to take pleasure from looking upon. Many Hollywood movies, especially the films of Hitchcock and Sternberg, were widely studied on the basis of this version of psychoanalytic theory. Subsequently, new sources for revitalizing feminist film theory emerged through performance studies, new media studies, phenomenology and Deleuzian philosophy. These are theoretical frameworks that move beyond the semiotic preoccupation with meaning, representation and interpretation. Taking Mulvey’s analysis as its starting point, this chapter examines the specific techniques of the veteran Malayalam filmmaker, K. G. George’s representation of women in his film Adaminte Variyellu (Adam’s Rib) and men in Panchavadi Palam (Panchavadi Bridge) in order to suggest an alternative way of understanding the status of women and men in these works. In particular, this chapter aims to mobilize Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema and other artistic media in order to argue the case that K. G. George’s films offer his characters a status that can be enjoyed by the spectator without any preconceived notions. The Deleuzian approach allows for a less negative outlook on desire, subjectivity and identity; opening up readings of film as embodying many forms of desire and creating experiences of affirmation for the spectator (Smelik in Wiley Blackwell Encycl Gend Sex Stud: 1–5, 2016).
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Notes
- 1.
The director of ‘Panchavadi Palam,’ Kulakkattil Geevarghese George, was born in Tiruvalla, in British Travancore, in 1946. He graduated in Political Science, before pursuing his Diploma in Film Direction at Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. He started his film career by writing screenplay for Ramu Kariat’s Nellu (Paddy), in 1974. K. G. George made his directorial debut with Swapnadanam in 1976. It won the national award in the same year. It also won the Kerala State Award for the best film in the same year. K. G. George’s Adaminte Variyellu (Adam’s Rib), a 1983 political satire, was classified as a feminist movie of the period.
- 2.
Panchayat is the body of elected representatives who form the local government at the village level in India.
- 3.
Indira Gandhi was the prime minister of India. She was shot dead on October 31, 1984. She was known as the Iron Lady of India. She was known for her political valour, intelligence and power. She was a stateswoman and the central figure of the Indian National Congress. She was the first and only female prime minister of India.
- 4.
The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective analyzes things, the way they are handled in different social and cultural settings. The book mainly focuses on the ways in which people find value in things, how they are externalized and sought after.
- 5.
Georg Simmel was a German sociologist, critic, and a philosopher. His fame rests chiefly on works concerning sociological methodology. He wrote on almost everything, including love, religion, ethics, money, and culture. Simmel received his doctorate in philosophy from Berlin in 1881. His ideas and thoughts seemed to have influenced a vast array of scholars, including renowned sociologists like Norbert Elias and Robert Park.
- 6.
Henri Lefebvre theorizes the every day as residual. According to Lefebvre (2008), everyday life is all about the activities that are inclusive of their differences and their fights. Everyday life can also be considered as the totality of relations which make every living being to take its shape and its form.
- 7.
Mahabharata is an ancient Indian epic where the main plot revolves around the two main branches of a family—Kauravas and Pandavas. The epic comprises one hundred thousand stanzas of verses divided into eighteen books. This Sanskrit epic is reported to belong to the period between 400 B.C. and 400 A.D.
- 8.
Michael Taussig belongs to the early Frankfurt School scholars whose writing experiments subscribe to the idea that ethnographers should abandon all pretense of innocence and consider their texts as forms of fiction rather than representations of allegedly objective realities. He wrote his first book on fetishism, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980).
- 9.
A 1904 document written by an Irish diplomat, Roger Casement, Putumayo report or Casement report, details abuses in the Congo Free State which was under private ownership. The report showed the discrepancies in the private ownership and exploitation of natural resources by King Leopold II of Belgium.
- 10.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) is a political party in India that follows Marxist–Leninist theory.
- 11.
Bharatiya Janata Party is one of the major political parties in India. BJP is a right-wing party. Its origin is traced to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh formed by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee in 1951. RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) is a Hindu nationalist volunteer organization and is widely regarded as the parent organization of the BJP.
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Vasudev, A. (2020). Materialities, Subjectivities and the Symbolic Spaces of Destruction and Hope in K. G. George’s Films. In: Ravindran, G. (eds) Deleuzian and Guattarian Approaches to Contemporary Communication Cultures in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2140-9_9
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