The paper seeks to explain how the connotations of the sign ’woman’ have been operating in different guises within the Indian film texts over the last few decades- the meanings it has been made to bear and how has it disengaged and placed the dominant power structures the paper is a fusion of feminist criticism and Film theory, with the basic premise being that it is not enough for cinema to merely offer more positive roles for women or for women to operate collectively to produce more realistic film images, for film making to be transformed. This paper examines the various themes that have been pertinent to the female protagonist of Indian Cinema (particularly Hindi Cinema) and the diverse transformations that the cinematic representation of the woman in the apparently male-centric Indian Cinema has broadly gone through. Their stereotypes are the product of unconscious assumptions ingrained too deeply to be changed merely by putting more women in potent positions within the film industry, primarily as the ‘leading ladies.’ It is in this climate that the feminist film theory begins- as an urgent political act and feminists from Simone de Beauvoir onwards had seen cinema as a key carrier of contemporary cultural myths through which our material existences are viewed and lived. Films reflect social changes but they also shape cultural attitudes. For the past two decades or so, cinema has proven to be the critical ground on which feminist debates about culture, identity and representation have been held.
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