Chapter 3 - The Lumpen Aesthetics of Mrinal Sen: Cinema Novo Meets Urban Fiction

Summary

Chapter 3 explores non-Bollywood, regional Indian cinema. I take up the depiction of urban struggles in Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71 ‘1972’. Sen’s “city films,” as these are called, are trailblazing experiments in stylistic form and anticolonial theory. They explicitly draw from Latin American Cinema Novo, particularly “Imperfect Cinema” and “Third Cinema” popularized by the Cuban Julio Garcia Espinosa and the Argentinians Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, respectively. On the other hand, Sen is equally indebted to Bengali literature on the city, which includes the work of the poet Jibanananda Das and the prose writers Manik Bandyopadhyay and Samaresh Basu among others. Sen’s cinema sets in motion a conceptually daring relationship between film, literature, and politics. He authors what I call a lumpen-aesthetics, which turns a pejorative term for the dissident poor ‘the lumpen’ into an objective assessment of peripheral society. It is a cinema that is adequate to the task of representing the city and articulating its peculiarly peripheral fractures.s