Asian Cinema - Volume 10, Issue 1, 1998

The person of the Buddha and his teachings have profoundly influenced Eastern thought for twenty-five hundred years. As a metaphysical system, the essential qualities of Buddhism have been communicated throughout the centuries in story and image. One of the methods of transmitting the teachings has been through anecdotal narratives, such as the stories about Mileropa or the Bokuden fables, recorded for occidentals by Suzuki. These didactic tales generally illustrate confused or enlightened states of mind. Another mode, common to the transmission of other religious traditions as well, is through the visual imagery of ceremony and the fine arts.

It is the purpose of this paper to show that there are signs of change in the popular cinema of India today. These signs are of a qualitative rather than a quantitative nature. However, they are sufficiently present to lead us to draw certain conclusions: a) that there are signs of a successful merging of India's parallel and popular cinemas. In this merging, there seems to be a tentatively growing acceptance of "new" stories; that among other things, these new stories seem to be/really are empowering women b) that there is a change in the north/south nexus from the way it has traditionally operated. These changes are causing rethinking among filmmakers and changing expectations on the part of the filmgoing public.

It was never meant to be easy to choose a film and perform an analytical surgery on its multiple reels of film. The disassembling of the frames created a chaotic collection of narratives and meanings. To make sense out of this chaos was to ask myself to pick up the pieces, frame by frame, and recreate a bricolage of what this particular film meant to me and hence, what I wanted to say about it. Along the process of an analytical surgery, another factor came to affect my choice of which frame to cut as well as which frames to join together. Namely, my personal values that affect every frame that was chosen and every word that was printed on this paper, and how my own cultural, moral and social values affect the reading of a film. It depends on how effective can I analyze through a web of intangible social relations where I stand out as an Asian lesbian feminist activist and a graduate student in the Educational Studies department of an academic institution, namely, the University of British Columbia. But it also depends on how clear am I in where I situate myself among different personal identities and the meanings of these identities prescribed by myself and by others. As a result, personal standards of what counts as representation and what does not become evident in the splicing and cutting of frames.