Singing Bodies and ‘Movement’ Images in a 1937 Tamil Film

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze’s film philosophy is best known for its discovery of ‘movement images’ and ‘time images’ in the ubiquitous category of filmic images. The advent of Deleuze’s film philosophy has not only pushed the boundaries of filmic images beyond their ‘representational’ territory, but unleashed a very innovative and relevant theoretical framework to examine the narrative locations of films produced in different cultural territories. Early Tamil cinema is best known for its potential to invoke the power of singing bodies through a countless number of songs. The Deleuzian notion of ‘movement images’ provides more than enough pointers to examine early Tamil cinema’s attempts to construct ‘movement images’ through the singing bodies. In examining the singing bodies of the 1937 Tamil film, Chintamani, this article seeks to innovate by deploying Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘abject’ along with Deleuze’s concept of ‘movement images’. The analytical juxtaposition of these two different concepts reveals itself eminently in uncovering new layers of narrative locations of the singing bodies in Chintamani.