Of Displaced Desires: Interrogating ‘New’ Sexualities and ‘New’ Spaces in Indian Diasporic Cinema

Abstract

Cinema, extending (or reconfiguring, if one will) the still photograph, offers a new point of departure for a discussion on ways in which space and movement function in the representation of images. If Benjamin is talking, here, of the close-up shot as a technical innovation that transforms what we see and how we see it, I will attempt to read the cinematic apparatus itself as a ‘close-up’, that identifies particular moments in time and space and places them in a narrative of images, not necessarily rendering them ‘more pre-cise’ but revealing, instead, ‘entirely new formations of the subject’. Anna Friedberg has used Benjamin’s formulation to understand the role of cinema in postmodernity (1991, p. 419); I will look at cinema as a postmodernist intervention in the diasporic condition — so caught in complexities of time, space and motion — and attempt to read patterns of changing sexualities in the context of such shifting gazes and spaces.

[W]ith the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new formations of the subject.

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the

Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1969, p. 236)