REMEDIATION: Iconic Images and Everyday Spaces

WOMAN AS A FETISH:

These images (of Aman, Helen, and Jayamalini) present the actress purely as fetish or “erotic spectacle.” Aman’s image, Fig.13, shows how the somewhat distant, alluring and sexually attractive heroine actually mirrors the nurturing wife/mother. While Aman directly addresses the unseen (male) spectator with her look and gestures (arms raised, leg showing etc.), Helen in this publicity still, Fig.14, performs a mujra, and ‘Sex Queen’ Jayamalini does a cabaret of sorts in Fig.15. While Helen and Jayamalini have almost identical and atypical dance ‘poses’ - their arms stretched out, and hips thrust out in opposing directions – these examples also show how the image of (some) heroines actually alter and can fit into disparate categories.

Fig. 13	Fig.14
Fig. 15

MASOCH’S WOMAN AND MASCULINITY:

The third category, which is apparently different but perhaps more alluring, is the image of the powerful woman. Vijayashanti in Fig.16 in a police uniform and a phallic gun on her back, and Sriprada in Fig. 17, with a machine gun and a belt of bullets around her chest, as well as an iconic falcon on her left arm resemble Masoch’s perversely pleasurable and overbearing woman. However, instead of making a feminist intervention, these images actually reinstate certain notions about masculinity, which are ‘acted’ out by Vinod Khanna , Fig. 18 and Danny, Fig.19, both pointing guns in similar ways at unseen characters. In comparison, Sriprada appears to be simply ‘enacting,’ somewhat childishly and provocatively, an otherwise masculine social role.

Fig. 16	Fig.17
Fig. 18	Fig. 19

MATERIAL BODIES:

John Berger (1972) wrote how ‘men act’ and ‘women appear’. He also examined how the ‘ways of seeing’ are predetermined, and how ‘men look at women’ and women also ‘watch themselves being looked at’ (Mulvey also writes about ‘look-at-me-ness’). That representations of women acknowledge the unknown/unseen spectator is evident from the modes of address, which make at least the 3/4th of the body visible to the imaginary viewer. While notions of self and gender are never outside social constructions (to borrow Judith Butler’s 1993 formulations) nevertheless interventions happen in and through such ‘mediated’ domains to which we arrive later.

Surprisingly, there are few or no distinctions between the ways in which mainstream/popular and alternative/art cinema reproduces itself through publicity stills.  In fact, bodily gestures and representations of women in both types of cinema seem to feed into each other. While questions of intimacy are addressed more frontally in ‘art/alternative’ films, these films often also present women in victimised positions. Note the similarities in the projection of the female body in the photograph of Jayaprada in Megha Sandesam, Fig.20, and in the still from Basu Chatterjee’s Sheesha, Fig. 21, showing Mallika Sarabhai and Mithun Chakrabarty, as well as in images from Ek Pal, Fig.22, showing Faruque Sheikh and Shabana Azmi , and a publicity still of Drohkaal, Fig.23, and Utpalendu Chakraborty’s Debshishu (Il Dio Bambino), Fig.24.

Fig. 20	Fig.21
Fig. 22	Fig. 23

Here, Smita Patil (shown with Sadhu Meher) evidently plays a victim, while Dipti Naval shown in Budhadeb Dasgupta’s Andhi Gali  Fig.25, is pensive and apparently in a receiving position (no details of publication). While in many of these films women eventually re-emerge as powerful figures despite the violence inflicted on them (as in Drohkaal, Andhi Gali), the publicity still seem to rely on certain prototypes of gender, sexuality and intimacy associated with passivity and/or victimhood.

Fig. 24	Fig.25