Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
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Item India In-Between: Culture and Nation Representation in Jean Renoir’s Film the River (1951)(Taylor & Francis, 2020-10) Shekhawat, SushilaThe above conversation from Jean Renoir’sFootnote1 film, The River, based on Rumer Godden’s 1946 book of the same name, is jarringly symbolic of the identity formation of India as a colonized nation. History, as documentation of past experiences and narratives, has predominantly existed in the form of written texts. Historical documents, journals and newspaper articles have elaborately discussed India under the colonial rule and during partition. The post-colonial experiences have also manifested itself in biographies, autobiographies and even in works of fiction such as that of Manto and Chughtai, to name a few. But with the advent of technology in the form of a camera, history and narration have found a novel way to manifest itself not just as written words but also as images. Further on, these still images have evolved into motion pictures. “In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” Bazin argues that photography and cinema are discoveries that finally satisfy the obsession with realism… The photographic image is a mechanical reproduction of reality and we therefore accept as real the object reproduced or re-presented”.Footnote2 Set in the banks of the river Ganges in West Bengal, Renoir’s cinematography establishes the topography as the mise en scène while the camera captures daily activities of human lives in a realistic manner. Faulkner in The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir writes:Footnote3Item Media, Culture and Ethics(Macmillan, 2018-01) Sharma, Sangeeta; Shekhawat, Sushila; Yadav, AnupamMedia has become such a prominent source of information today that we just cannot ignore it. Apart from traditional media, the alternate media has occupied a major space in the life of an individual. With the dependence on media for information dissemination, responsibility of being correct is the major concern. Everyone has his/her own prejudices and is guided by whimsical thoughts, so it is imperative to have media literacy to understand the information transferred through any media. Today every individual has the power to generate news through social media. The accuracy of the information is decided by the reader, based on prerequisite information. Media and popular culture percolate in all aspects of our waking time. The unrelenting exposure predominantly guides our perception of reality, The formation of our values, our beliefs and attitudes and above all it defines self and society. This has become an extraordinarily powerful educating agent amongst majority of the population. The speed with which it is influencing the society has blinded us. Hence, it becomes imperative to have complete and true reflection of the cultures in which the stories are set.