Through the digital peephole
LSD and the grammar of transparency
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12713837 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kuhu Tanvir (University of Pittsburgh, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 31-45 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Asian Popular Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1474-6689 • E-ISSN: 1474-6697 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14746689.2015.1024593 |
| OpenAlex | W2084987570 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 4 |
In this article, I will argue that the use of digital capture in its myriad forms – webcams, spy-cams, CCTV etc – is crucial to Dibakar Benerjee's self-conscious bouquet film, Love, Sex aur Dhokha (Love, Sex and Deception). Use of digital technology is central to LSD's othering of itself and heightening its reality effect. In the adoption of digital cameras and digital aesthetics, the film aspires to a pristine notion of ‘truth’ that exposes the masquerade of celluloid (which the film stages as a staple of ‘Bollywood’). The deliberation on surveillance and voyeurism stages the body as the site where the effect of surveillance apparatus and its violence is most visible. Digital cameras are able to boast a physical proximity to the body that the bulky 35 mm camera cannot achieve, thus crucially altering the way the body is represented and consequently, the way the audience consumes and decodes the image. In this, the film also engages with the persistent idiom of family melodramas that has dominated the cinematic landscape of popular Bombay cinema. Distancing itself from the asexual presentation of love that popular Bombay cinema is (in)famous for, LSD mediates love through the contemporary's signature hunger for access, particularly visual access. The argument that the film makes is that digital technology has access to spaces that are devoid of the romance of ‘fiction’ and are in fact inhabited by a pervading violence. However, it simultaneously also spotlights the technology itself as the medium that engenders this violence, makes it manifest, visible, documented and ultimately erasable
Aesthetics · Art · Cityscape · Computer security · Movie theater · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Transparency (behavior · Visual arts · Voyeurism · Cinema and Media Studies · Computer Science · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · South Asian Cinema and Culture
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2017 - 2023 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |