The poetics of Indian cinema

This dossier is concerned with the ‘poetics’ of Indian cinema, in relation both to a single work and to the use of certain devices and stylistic features across a range of works. It uses the term in the sense elaborated by David Bordwell when he suggests a distinction between ‘method’ and ‘poetics’. Rather than drawing on a distinct critical school and its own doctrinal procedures for interpreting textual features, Bordwell notes that the poetics of any artistic medium studies the finished work as the result of a process of construction – a process that includes a craft component (such as rules of thumb), the more general principles according to which the work is composed, and its functions, effects, and uses.1 In this sense, all the contributions to this dossier attend to constructional devices and their effects in a work. Assumptions about form have long been implicit in Indian cinema’s journalistic and industrial frames of reference. The cinema and its variations have been largely defined through a shorthand vocabulary – the ‘masala film’, the ‘multiplex film’ and the ‘art film’ – each term coming with well-known formal attributes. For example the dominant commercial masala film is a concatenation of ‘ingredients’ (action, comedy, song and dance) strung together via melodrama. The art film and its realism in popular discourse has been defined as much by the absence of song-and-dance sequences as by certain themes, while the multiplex film is now seen as a combination of Hollywood-style psychological realism and the idioms of global art cinema.2

Aesthetics · Art · Dance · Literature · Movie theater · Poetics · Realism · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · South Asian Cinema and Culture

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