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Issue 2, 2007
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From the Editor
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Welcome to this issue of In Plainspeak that brings you special articles
from Films of Desire: Sexuality and the Cinematic Imagination, a four day
event that was organised by CREA and the Resource Centre in March 2007 around
sexuality and films. CREA is an NGO, based in New Delhi, India, that empowers
women to articulate, demand and access their human rights by enhancing women’s
leadership and focussing on issues of sexuality, sexual and reproductive rights,
violence against women, women’s rights and social justice.
Why did we want to put sexuality and film together, well might you ask. What comes to mind? Sexy movies? Porn? Sitting in the back row of the
theatre with someone? Perhaps little else, unless you work on sexuality or with
film. But if you think about a little more, you will see that almost every film
made, has something to say about sexuality. Not just in what is shown in terms
of sex or romantic scenes, but also by way of the assumptions about the
characters and events in the film. Who does the main character romance? What are
the messages about romance itself? What happens when sexual codes are broken? If
there are any ‘deviants’ (sexual or gender non-conformists) in the film at all,
what roles do they occupy? Are they objects of veneration or of ridicule? Are
they centre-stage or do they lurk in the shadowy margins? See, there’s more to
even a seemingly girl-meets-boy, they fall in love and live happily ever after
movie. It’s telling us something about the world we live in, even though it is
‘only a movie’.
These ideas were discussed and worked on through a year long planning process
culminating in Films of Desire with a team of core organisers that
included Geetanjali Misra, Shilpa Phadke and Shohini Ghosh, and myself. The team
worked together to craft an event that would focus on the ways in which
cinematic representations interact with ideas of sexuality, gender, sexual
identity, erotica and censorship, sometimes challenging them and at other times
reinforcing them. A space for activists, film lovers, academics, students and
film-makers to share in the pleasure of watching films, and also to engage with
each other in critically discussing issues of sexuality and representation.
Films of Desire was a happy mix of film screenings, panel discussions,
interviews with film directors, and many discussions that continued late into
the night. This issue of In Plainspeak brings you some glimpses from
there.
As we all know, films are a very powerful medium of communication. Films reflect what is going on in society at a
particular time, they reflect or allay social anxieties; they sometimes solidify social norms and, at
others, offer an alternative vision of being.
Films of Desire put the power of visual representation together with the
lure of that most forbidden of subjects, sexuality, and
the result was fascinating. Sexuality, itself, whether as lived
experience, or as a field of study, is a space of contestation,
bursting over with a multiplicity of tensions. Sexual desire
has its own potential to liberate.
Sexual desire is not always
only about the ‘sexual’, but comes imbued with layers of
power, and sometimes not-so-sunny motives, like anger,
control, retribution, and even death. The dark places
of desire are as important to understand as its power to revolutionise, through
cinematic representation.
So also, cinematic representation is complex, in content, form and its
effects. How artists or film makers choose to represent visual images depends on
their imagination, craft, and aesthetic preferences. Films screened at the event
took many forms –
short films, features, experimental films, music videos, documentaries.
Viewers are not passive observers of visual images.
Different viewers do not see the same thing when they
watch the same movie – they interpret things according
to what they bring into their movie-watching experience.
People ‘read’ films differently. It’s what the spectators bring
with their gaze, or the way they look at something. Thus a
queer gaze can queer a film. As Shohini Ghosh often says, 'Think of the male-bonding
sequences in Bollywood films, the older ones like Sholay
(Embers) or Yaarana (Friendship), and the newer movies
like Kal Ho Na Ho (If Tomorrow Never Comes), or even
in older Hollywood films like Ben Hur, or newer ones like
Alexander, where part of the audience reads the scenes as
male-bonding sequences and others see them as covertly
or even overtly, homoerotic'.
Today, there is a proliferation of visual images all around us
– newspaper photos, TV, films, videos, DVD, MTV, Webcam
shots, and many more. These may be impelled by artistic,
political or economic motivations; whatever the case, they
are thriving. Images talk not just with their audiences; they
also ‘talk’ with each other. More so, with globalisation,
these conversations between representations of visual
images are not restricted by geographical boundaries or by
‘form’.
The interrogation of images and diverse readings of them was the focus of
discussions at Films of Desire. Because of the undisputed power of the image, it
is important for us to look at how different sexualities, sexual practices,
sexual expectations, gender roles, and messages about sexual and gender
conformity are depicted in cinema, and how they are read. Films work in our
imagination, our cinematic imagination. This imagination is both personal and
collective. That is why films speak to more than one person and hold the power
they have.
The authors of the articles in this issue of In Plainspeak, through their
reflections on films they watched, panels they attended and conversations they
had at Films of Desire, discuss how questions of sexuality and representation
are often fraught with anxiety and ossify around a set of stereotypical
binaries: heterosexual-homosexual; masculine-feminine, sameness-difference,
family entertainment-pornography, to name some, and show how moving away from
these binaries of black and white allows us to enjoy the full spectrum of the
exhilarating range of human experience and emotion.
Just like what Aparna Sen, one of India’s doyennes of
cinema said at a public interview with Shohini Ghosh at Films of Desire:
`I think people have sex appeal
and that is irrespective of gender, or age, or anything.
One person finds another person attractive. It doesn’t
necessarily have to translate into physical intimacy but it
could, it needn’t but it can be an attraction. Like, I have had
so many women friends with whom I have enjoyed hours
of chatting because I just find them so attractive as people
and I cannot analyse why, just like I can’t analyse my films.
I can’t analyse why I find them attractive. I mean you just
buy it, and if that happens with a man then of course it is
expected. It is expected both by society, and by the man,
and possibly by women, that it will translate into some
sort of physical intimacy. It is rare when it doesn’t in case
of heterosexual people, but I’m an incurable romantic, of
course. This is true. In any case, I think of something that an
American actor, whose name I have forgotten, said – that
he approaches a role through that character’s sex appeal.
What is the sex appeal of a character? It may be nothing
tangible. It could be a limp. It could be a crooked smile. It
could be anything, but there is a certain attractiveness in
everyone, and to find that attractiveness is a very attractive
process.’
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