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Subject: search.filters.subject.Malayalam Cinema

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    Crisis of capitalist patriarchy: renegotiating masculinity and the heteronormative family in Kumbalangi Nights
    (Taylor & Francis, 2022-01) Mathew, Paul
    The Malayalam language film Kumbalangi Nights was released in 2019 and narrated the story of working-class people negotiating structures of capitalist patriarchy, encountered at moments of its crisis, which are also moments that indicate possibilities for social transformation. The trajectory of its narrative, the characters, and the tropes addressed in the film offer a new synthesis—both, of hegemonic masculinity and the kinship structure of the heteronormative family. Here, working-class lives are foregrounded in the contemporary crisis of patriarchy, accelerated by the crisis of social reproduction under neoliberal capitalism. Central to this crisis of masculinity and the bourgeois family form depicted in the film is the “crisis of care” that has been explained in recent scholarship on social reproduction. Nancy Fraser uses the expression to analyse the contradictory capitalist tendency to strain the conditions of social reproduction necessary for its own reproduction and stability. Through an analysis of the film, and the social realities of contemporary Kerala, this paper identifies the contours of this new synthesis. The film imagines a new mode of existence for subordinate masculinities, and challenges some of the ideologies of capitalist patriarchy, while continuing to valorise romantic love and its relationship to work.
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    Imagining the Malayali Nation: Early Malayalam Cinema and the Making of a Modern Malayali identity
    (DIALOGIST, 2021) Afzal, P. Muhammed
    In this paper I explore the role that early Malayalam cinema played in the consolidation of a nascent Malayali linguistic identity. The paper examines the nationalist address that Malayalam cinema adopted as part of its industrial and aesthetic realignments in the context of mobilizations around the Malayali identity. The paper also offers a brief discussion of how the Left-affiliated artists in the Malayalam film industry offered a cultural vision for modern Kerala in mid-twentieth century. Through a discussion of the Left intervention in the field of popular cinema, the relationship among language politics, Left politics and popular cinema in the region is examined.
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    Melodrama, Ascetic Modality, and Communist Self-fashioning: Mukhamukham and the Communist Hero in Malayalam Cinema
    (Rupkatha Journal, 2021-03) Afzal, P. Muhammed
    This paper treats the Malayalam film Mukhamukham and the debates it engendered in the Kerala public sphere about the history and legacy of communism as an archive of passions and disavowals that have shaped the political subjectivities in contemporary Kerala and explores how the film offers a critique of the Left popular in Kerala. Through a critique of the ascetic modality of the communist hero, Mukhamukham offers a critique of the representative strategies through which the communist hero was produced in the early Left political melodramas in Malayalam, which have been a significant part of the Left’s constitutive role in the construction of the domain of the popular in Kerala. The attempt in this paper is to read the film as one that, while marked by liberal prejudices, offers a critique of the Left popular and certain prevailing notions on the Left in Kerala. The paper explores how the film represents the figure of the revolutionary; and the shift from the melodramatic conventions of the construction of the revolutionary figure that Gopalakrishnan attempts in the film.
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    Melancholic Vision and Utopian Imagination: Amma Ariyan and Left-wing Culture in Kerala in the 1970s
    (Rupkatha Journal, 2021) Afzal, P. Muhammed
    Situating the Malayalam film Amma Ariyan in the context of radical Left politics in Kerala during the “long 1970s”, this paper argues that Left-wing cultural productions during the period offered a melancholic vision of history that sustained a utopian imagination. In popular discussions, the 1970s is seen as a period of “misguided adventurism” and defeat, and the nostalgia for the period is treated as a paralyzing, backward looking attitude. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on Left melancholy, nostalgia, and utopia, this paper looks back at the 1970s from a perspective where melancholia is a stance that offers a critical vision of the past as well as the future. This paper argues that the “failed heroes” in Left-wing cultural productions in the 1970s refused to “resign themselves to … the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities”. This “refusal to be realistic” has been very central to the sustaining of a utopian imagination which acquires more significance in the context of the perceived reactivation of “communist desire” in the contemporary times.