ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin drew judicious attention to this when arguing that “genuine storytelling”—by which he was implying stories that are told rather than written and read—was by no means a job for the voice alone. Intriguingly, what late twentieth-century masala films reveal is how, when translated into a visual medium, those paralinguistic characteristics of oral performance can mutate into a character’s own kinetic comport, which is to say his physical gesturing. In fact, movement, like the utterance—as if an extension of the utterance—is crucial and practically compulsory in these films. As Eric Havelock colorfully describes in The Greek Concept of Justice, In the context of military confrontation they become generals, commanders of great masses of men; in their civil aspect they become kings and queens and princes and princesses, grandiose versions of members of that public for whose benefit the oral epic is being composed.
