Shohini Chaudhuri

Snake charmers and child brides: Deepa Mehta's Water, ‘exotic’ representation, and the cross‐cultural spectatorship of South Asian migrant cinema

The high media profile and ‘crossover’ success of South Asian migrant filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta has often bred accusations that they deliberately package themes and aesthetics in order to stir up controversy and produce an ‘exotic’ India for global audiences. This claim has recently been played out in relation to the Oscar‐nominated film Water (2005), which provoked protests from Hindu fundamentalists and death threats to Mehta and her crew. My article argues that exoticist representation is a significant tendency within contemporary world cinema and needs to be addressed without the customary moral condemnation implied in both popular reactions and academic studies that favour more experimental works. It attempts to shift the terms of the debate by deconstructing the notion of the touristic, Western gaze to which these films ostensibly pander and mobilise a more fluid set of perspectives – the invocation of different regimes of sensuous knowledge and the cross‐cultural adaptation of melodrama – to illuminate Waters aesthetic choices, export success, and interpretation of gender power dynamics.

The Alterity of the Image: the Distant Spectator and Films about the Syrian Revolution and War

ABSTRACT Images of the Syrian crisis, circulating on the international film festival circuit as well as in mainstream and social media, help to construct narratives about those events, people and places. This article explores how three Syrian documentaries – Silvered Water: Syria Self-Portrait, The War Show and Little Gandhi – appeal to their distant spectators and how the international film festival circuit shapes their aesthetic form. While the use of citizen videos in news reporting has generated a sense of familiarity with the audio-visual style and iconography of Syrian conflict imagery, these films invite us to look at their footage in a different way, foregrounding an experience of cultural distance through an emphasis on the formal qualities of the image. By focusing on the aesthetic rather than merely evidentiary qualities of these documentaries, I draw out a particular kind of transnational cinematic encounter in which, to borrow John Berger’s words, ‘meaning is a response not only to the known, but to the unknown’. Drawing upon the work of Berger and Laura Marks, the article offers a new conceptualization of distant spectatorship in terms of the alterity of the image.