Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination (review)

Indian films have long enjoyed an international following with Asian, African and Russian moviegoers. Recent years have also witnessed a surge of interest in them among "Western" audiences, including scholars and filmmakers. Yet the spike in attention has not translated into a more heightened regard for the quality and concinnity of Indian cinema. Mainstream films from India continue to be viewed for the most part as kitschy, albeit money-spinning, extravaganzas—not only abroad, but even in India. Understanding Indian Movies is Patrick Colm Hogan's bid to confute such stereotypes and furnish a template for keener practices of film appreciation.

Hogan presents his project as a combination of two main concerns. The obvious purpose is to help people "understand and respond fully to a range of Indian movies'—and not just the specific films he covers—through a primer on culture-specific "knowledge and skills that are generalizable" (2008, 3). A further aim is to alter the broader paradigm of film reception "by locating cultural particularity within cross-cultural patterns," instead of "insisting on cultural differences" after the current critical vogue (4). These twin agendas dictate not only the kinds of films Hogan selects for study, but also the types of concepts, notions, and resonances he accents within the films studied.

Theoretically, the dual emphasis of Understanding Indian Movies is integrated through recourse to "principles [drawn] from cognitive neuroscience" (4). According to Hogan, "our engagement with films is bound up with a series of complex cognitive operations" that obtain cross-culturally (251). At present, he argues, "cognitive neuroscience… comprises the best complex of theories available" for analyzing all aspects of film "[f]rom narrative structure to visual construction" (7). Even so, Hogan is not interested in mere procrustean fitting of cinematic texts to neuro-cognitive frames. Rather, through the exegesis attempted, he hopes to "enhance our understanding of Indian cinema," while clarifying "the basic principles of cognitive neuroscience as they bear on the study of film[s]," and "advance the study of cognitive universals, along with our understanding of the relation between universals and cultural particularity" (7).

Understanding Indian Movies puts together five chapters flanked by a detailed introduction about what to expect and why, and a brief afterword that combines summary with sundry disclaimers. Each chapter is focused on a different component of filmic textuality: plot, theme, emotion, sound, and visual style. Eleven movies are discussed in all, with reference to prototypical plots of "romantic, heroic and sacrificial tragicomedy" (8); the theme of violence and "the epilogue of suffering" (10); emotions of anger, mirth, and sorrow and the empathic response they elicit; musical interludes as "extensive formalization and elaboration of narrative junctures" (162–63); and finally, "figural vision" plus questions of "light intensity, boundary definition and color" (195). Since Hogan early on rejects as specious the commonplace polarization of popular and "art" cinema in India, his choices include both types of films. They are Shyam Benegal's Nishant, Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist, Ramesh Sippy's Sholay, Ajit Chakrabarty's Ardhangini, Guru Dutt's Baaz, Raj Kapoor's Shree 420, Muzaffar Ali's Umrao Jaan, Mehboob Khan's Mother India, Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen, Karan Johar's Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, and Deepa Mehta's Fire. Along with cognitive universals, Hogan uses culturally particular ideas—motives, models and matrices deriving from Indic philosophy, mythic accretions associated with Hindu gods and goddesses, epics such as Ramayana and Silappadikaram, precepts of Sufism, and the aesthetic theories of rasa and dhvani, among others—to interpret these productions.

Given the atypical mix of cutting edge experimental knowledge and non-modern Indian traditions of thought, practice and society, Understanding Indian Movies could easily have lapsed into inscrutable acadamese. It is to Hogan's credit that his prose remains consistently jargon-free and accessible. The thesis of Understanding Indian Movies is clearly formulated; its plan systematically executed. Hogan's critical studies are always interesting and sometimes riveting. His exposition of the nature and function of the...