Epilogue: Five Minutes and Fifteen Seconds with Ritwik Ghatak

Abstract

Looking back over the thoroughgoing revolution in film style ushered in by films including Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), Raymond Bellour reflects that, ‘under the pressure of modern cinema’, what he calls mise en pli or the process of folding ‘more or less absorbs and dissolves, in its metamorphoses, the steady forms of mise en scène’ (2009, p. 146). Yet not only is the triumph of such modernism in cinema never total — it is also not entirely new. The more crucial truth, as Bellour recognises, is that, ‘since its beginnings in the era of early cinema and right through its deployment by classical cinema’, mise en scène has, in fact, always been — if we can look at it with fresh eyes — something multiple and heterogeneous, open to every kind of fluctuation and fold. And films are not (as the poststructuralists sometimes thought) passively ‘subject’ to these forces; rather, they work with and shape them. What is expressive in cinema, finally, comes not just from the complexity of drama or character, but equally, or even more so, from the emotional, dynamic power of abstraction, from the materiality of the total, sensory event which a film is.