Presenter: Pooja Radhakrishnan
Registration Number: 018
Institution: Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, Punjab, India
Abstract: The digital era has been fruitful for Malayalam films, a regional film industry in India’s Kerala, for experimenting with new modes of storytelling. This paper explores a crucial juncture where the Covid-19 lockdown enacted in India, opens up new and innovative spatial experiments within this industry where digital technology plays a dominant role, in ways, hitherto unusual in Malayalam films. Inspired by American mystery thriller, Searching (2018), Malayalam language film, C U Soon (2020), makes use of the limited spatial conditions to shoot a film entirely on an iPhone and narrates it using a computer screen location. With C U Soon, Malayalam cinema supplies novel means of exploring the digital space, and also convincingly depicts technology as part of the Malayalee’s "everyday" (Lefebvre 2008).
Often known for its experimental cinema, and lauded for its emphasis on realism, the industry has been not so successful in producing overblown technological fantasies liked by the ordinary Malayali. One reason being Malayalam film’s obsession with realistic locations and depicting the everyday. However, in the past few years, the industry has seen a boom of tech jargon pertaining to social networking apps and others. Text messaging, video chats and many other smartphone applications have now become part of the Malayali lifestyle on screen. By resorting to concepts in cinema studies and cultural theory such as realism, the everyday, and space, this analysis tries to understand: a) how the idea of the "ordinary," integral to Malayalam films, reflects in its recent tech genre, b) how tech films like C U Soon overcome the Malayali audience’s general dislike for anything "extra ordinary"? And c) how recent Malayalam films, and C U Soon in particular, have been able to domesticize technology as an everyday Malayali culture?
Bio: Pooja R. is a second-year research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Ropar, Punjab, India. She is interested in the discipline of film studies with a focus on post-independence Indian popular cinema. She takes a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses the field of film sociology, history, national and global politics, and postcolonial theory. She is interested in the changing nature of spatial practices in Indian films and undertakes its socio-cultural reading. Her research topic focuses on the concept of space, fear, and the theory of the “other” in the context of cinematic geographies of post-emergency Hindi films. She holds a master’s degree from Kannur University, Kerala, in English Language and Literature.