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  • Ideational Cinema
  • Jarad Zimbler (bio)
Keya Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2010, 258pp

It is simple enough to say that art is a kind of thought, that poetry or music or cinema are ways of knowing the world, but since claims of this nature are often accompanied by critiques of instrumental reason, their precise meaning is more difficult to get at without collapsing back into abstraction. In one way or another, however, what is usually called form is considered important, and given form’s historical character, the explanation that follows must inevitably articulate what is thought not by art in general, but rather by the works at hand, situated within particular horizons of meaning.

This, more or less, is the approach adopted by Keya Ganguly in her study of the cinema of Satyajit Ray, in which she sets out to show how ‘his works do not so much reflect historical, aesthetic, or cultural problems as present critical, dialectical conceptualizations of the continuities between art and experience’ (p18). The key word here is ‘conceptualizations’: Ganguly several times insists that Ray’s aim was neither to transcribe an authentic India, nor escape into the pleasures of free play promised to the cosmopolitan auteur, but instead ‘to think with the cinema (as opposed to thinking about it)’ (p27). For her, as indeed for Ray, Cinema should thus do more than give back our view of reality: it should affect our sense of the world and our manner of envisioning it.

In a study that aligns itself explicitly with immanent critique, greater weight might have been given to Ray’s own writings on cinema, where he shows himself an acute critic of his own and others’ works. Instead, Ganguly’s heaviest debts are to Soviet film theory, especially Eisenstein’s, as well as to figures of or associated with the Frankfurt School, whose chief representatives here are Benjamin, Adorno and Kracauer. By its own admission, the book ‘is driven by the Frankfurt School’s insistence on a critical negativity toward matters of culture and aesthetics’ (p205). This does not mean however that its conceptions of modernity and the relationship between life, art and truth are simply carried over and applied to Ray’s films. On the contrary, Ganguly insists that Ray himself is implicated in critical theory’s moment and elaboration, and his films allow her to push against and work over ideas sometimes circumscribed by metropolitan literary and cinematic traditions. Thus, she claims that Ray’s cinema is true to Benjamin’s articulation of the allegorical and utopian but not to his Messianic or ‘idealized horizon of meanings’ (p73), whilst Devi prompts a re-alignment of Roland Barthes with Eisenstein’s ‘activist mode of thinking’ (p101), and Jalsaghar gives evidence that there are contexts in which, contra Adorno and Eisler, ciné-music need not reject communicability altogether.

Yet Ganguly’s principal aim remains an understanding of Ray’s cinema as ‘what Eisenstein had called “an ideational cinema” - a conceptualization of the world rather than a representational reaction to it’ (p26). What kind of thinking does Ray’s cinema in fact do? What does it know about the world, and how? First and foremost, Ray’s cinema knows the [End Page 226] badness of a contemporary reality constituted by global capitalism, a reality in which visuality has been prioritised and from which other forms of experience have been stripped away. It is precisely because of this prioritisation that Ray’s reflexive probing of visuality becomes a critique of modernity itself, or at least a means of confronting those contradictions of modern life that cannot be resolved by art alone. Often, this entails bringing visuality into relation with residual and slowly disappearing modes of experience, for which reason Ray’s films frequently choose settings in the past. In this regard, Ganguly attributes great importance to Reinhart Koselleck’s notion that ‘any given present is at the same time a “former future”’, and explains that Ray’s thinking about the past involves thinking about what the present has failed to be, and what it might yet become, an approach she reads as utopian through...

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