Cinema Beyond the Screen: Ashish Rajadhyaksha on John–Ghatak–Tarkovsky

In this continuing video, Ashish Rajadhyaksha further situates the idea of “expanded cinema” in the context of Indian cinematic histories of production and dissemination. Moderated by Arundhati Chauhan, the talk is part of ASAP | art’s ongoing public programming. In this edited recording of the post-talk discussion, various questions around the idea of new documentary aesthetics proposed by Rajadhyaksha, as seen in the works of Kislay, Arbab Ahmad and Payal Kapadia, among others, were addressed. 

The questions spanned ideas around the mediated image and experience of violence in documentary aesthetics and the various inherent forms that the State’s attempts to control cinema might take. Rajadhyaksha also enumerated the many facets of political aesthetics that have existed and evolved with the incorporation of new technologies and techniques of production and dissemination. He also emphasised the increasing relevance of the hacker-like existence of the filmmaker as they partake in fugitive acts in order to produce the cinema of our times. 

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is an independent scholar and curator. He is the author of several books, such as Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009) and Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (with Paul Willemen) (1994). Among his curatorial projects are Bombay-Mumbai 1992–2001 (with Geeta Kapur for Century City, Tate Modern, 2001) and Tah-Satah: A Very Deep Surface (Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, 2017).

In 2015, students of the Film and Television Institute of India took cinema to the streets with a strike, which was among the first of the agitations that raged across India's universities at that time. As the right to make and show films became central to defining freedom on campus, a new role emerged for the moving image. The names of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, John Abraham, Tarkovsky and Ghatak, as they were recited in slogans and displayed on banners, evoked a history of political cinema that had set itself against the might of India's political establishment. John–Ghatak–Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers (2023) tells the longer cinematic history of a technological and political transformation, redefining cinema amidst growing state totalitarianism and a new era in political struggle. 

(Featured Image: From Ashish Rajadhyaksha's John–Ghatak–Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers, New Delhi: SSAF–Tulika Books, 2023, page no. 77. Reproduced with permission from the publisher.)

Recorded on 16 September 2023.

In case you missed the first part of the talk, you can watch it here.

To read more about films that have documented the 2015 FTII Students’ Protests, revisit Najrin Islam’s essay on Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing and Ankan Kazi’s reflection on Kshama Padalkar’s The Strike and I.