| | 23 | ''' |
| | 24 | Administering the Symbols of Authenticity Production 151''' |
| | 25 | |
| | 26 | |
| | 27 | are a part of India’s thinking, even as, more and more, that thinking is directed to the impact of the scientific and technological civilization of the modern world’ (emphases added). |
| | 28 | |
| | 29 | |
| | 30 | What was the ‘scientific and technological civilization’ that was meant to solve such deep-rooted and ancient problems? The easy answer, pointing to the technological showpieces of the modern Nehruvian state, is shadowed by a different sort of responsibility that technologies of reproduction had to shoulder: one that could enable key acts of transference, providing thematized cultural, formal or even aesthetic resolutions for what seemed otherwise intractable problems of the contemporary, and so their relocation on more propi- tious narrative ground where they may be better dealt with. |
| | 31 | |
| | 32 | |
| | 33 | This was one of the contexts of early post-independence state support for the cinema, and the first direct intervention by the state in both film production and the process of ‘reading’ the cinema appropriately. What I further suggest here is that in almost all these cultural–economic productions the cinema found itself with as much an actual as a paradigmatic role to play, for all of these fields, dis- ciplines and practices inevitably left their trace on the perception of celluloid technology and its powers of realist representation. |
| | 34 | Reading Films ‘Nationalistically’: |
| | 35 | |
| | 36 | |
| | 37 | '''A Second Proposition of Film Theory |
| | 38 | ''' |
| | 39 | |
| | 40 | The view of the scientist that sought to erase the past and the non- scientific is further developed in official photographs of the Trombay atomic energy complex. These photographs, especially those dating from the 1960s, centre the iconic dome of the CIRUS reactor, showing it set in the middle of carefully landscaped gardens each conforming to an imposed geometry of two dimensions: a perfect circle and a rectangular form set within a triangular space. These gardens, sym- metrical in themselves, act also as a device to draw attention back to the perfect dome of the reactor at its centre. But the edges of this photograph betray the limits of transformation. The borders of the promontory on which the reactor is located are less clearly articulated in Cartesian space. They are scrublands, dry and spotted with unruly bushes. They mark the intransigence of the land, but, by the same token, denote the degree of human effort that has made this orderly and unnatural space possible. – Itty Abraham (1999: 160) |
| | 41 | |
| | 42 | |