ABSTRACT
In an interview with Janet Bergstrom, Raymond Bellour remarked that "the classical American cinema continued in the 20th century the great tradition of the 19th century European novel" (Penley 1988: 188). The continuation, however, is not a matter of staying sincere to the highly diversified nature of the form; nor is it to be confused with André Bazin's observation that in the hands of a medium-conscious director such as Rossellini, the aesthetic of (Italian) cinema is "simply the equivalent of the American novel" (Bazin 1971: 2.39). Instead, in the hands of Hollywood the novel went through a leveling process, the form was stripped of its heterogeneity and homogenized. But something else happened there as well: Hollywood cinema reorganized the received [reductive] realist narrative according to the structural universal of the Oedipal scenario. In this reorganization, what got enacted was the displacement of desire for the mother onto another woman without completely bypassing, symbolically, the overhanging threat of castration. While Bellour's argument could be applied to Bombay Cinema, what we have detected thus far is that any discursive historicization of Bombay Cinema needs to take into account two different traditions: a series of localized mediations and the melodramatic novel of the colonizer. To reprise my point, in Bombay Cinema (which began as a colonial form) one of the great borrowed literary forms has been melodrama. The expressive possibilities of this mode, I argue, are taken up in a highly localized manner by Bombay Cinema where "[melodramatic] pathos is [almost] everything" (Kakar 1981: 33) and which is "tendentially capable of being described as melodramatic" (Prasad 1998: 57).
