Thursday, October 13, 2011
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Noir Urbanisms; Dystopic Images of the Modern City
CHAPTER SEVEN Friction, Collision and the Grotesque
The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema
Ranjani Muzumdar
an active figure whose rage makes him see the city with a heightened
perception. This perceptual entry into the city does not generate urban images
through modes of distraction (jlanerie) but through sustained vigilante
action. 22 The figure of the vigilante is an imaginative urban figure, whose defiance
of the law produces a different order of urban mobility. As against the
aimless loitering associated with many urban figures, Madhav Apte's purposeful
mobility creates a heightened order of perception. This vigilante vision
operates like a counter-flaneur imagination that is not made of surfaces but
of dystopic "excavations:'
22 For Walter Benjamin, the flaneur was a "panoramically situated" spectator who
observed and absorbed through random selection the visual impressions generated
by the new commodity space of industrial modernity. The flaneur's gaze was
fragmented and adventurous as he/she confronted the magical world of the commodity
displayed in shop windows of city streets. As a perceptual mode flanerie
depends on distraction and a free movement of subjectivity where the gaze is organized
according to a "spontaneous, unmitigated and seemingly unsystematic
turn of attention towards the surface phenomena of the exterior world:' Encke
Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature and Film in Weimar Culture
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 26.
Society, says the philosopher Zygmut Bauman, is like a thin film of order
that functions like a cover-up operation to deny and suppress the chaos
beneath. For Bauman, chaos is a terrifying experience for those gripped by
the "routine of the given:' Chaos is like a "break in, 'the given', an irruption,
a crevice in the otherwise solid rock of normality, a hole in the smoothly
flowing routine of being:'24
24 Zygmut Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 14-15.
The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema
Ranjani Muzumdar
an active figure whose rage makes him see the city with a heightened
perception. This perceptual entry into the city does not generate urban images
through modes of distraction (jlanerie) but through sustained vigilante
action. 22 The figure of the vigilante is an imaginative urban figure, whose defiance
of the law produces a different order of urban mobility. As against the
aimless loitering associated with many urban figures, Madhav Apte's purposeful
mobility creates a heightened order of perception. This vigilante vision
operates like a counter-flaneur imagination that is not made of surfaces but
of dystopic "excavations:'
22 For Walter Benjamin, the flaneur was a "panoramically situated" spectator who
observed and absorbed through random selection the visual impressions generated
by the new commodity space of industrial modernity. The flaneur's gaze was
fragmented and adventurous as he/she confronted the magical world of the commodity
displayed in shop windows of city streets. As a perceptual mode flanerie
depends on distraction and a free movement of subjectivity where the gaze is organized
according to a "spontaneous, unmitigated and seemingly unsystematic
turn of attention towards the surface phenomena of the exterior world:' Encke
Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature and Film in Weimar Culture
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 26.
Society, says the philosopher Zygmut Bauman, is like a thin film of order
that functions like a cover-up operation to deny and suppress the chaos
beneath. For Bauman, chaos is a terrifying experience for those gripped by
the "routine of the given:' Chaos is like a "break in, 'the given', an irruption,
a crevice in the otherwise solid rock of normality, a hole in the smoothly
flowing routine of being:'24
24 Zygmut Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 14-15.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)