Films, Literature and Culture - Jasbir Jain

Film and literature are two mediums - one literary, the other performative - which use language and image in order to capture the lived reality of cultural constructs. But the processes of producing meaning and interpreting meaning are complex and multilayered, getting caught up in histories, locations, and experiences. Neither film nor literature is a self-contained autonomous medium or artifact, and even as they use and produce culture, they become its subverters. Films, Literature and Culture is a collection of 19 essays that focus on film director Deepa Mehta s Elements Trilogy, exploring the interconnections in the three categories and the manner in which they feed into each other. The range of the interpretative strategies is very diverse: social and political history --- gender positions and feminist theory --- cinematic frameworks and the theory of the gaze --- landscape, space and exteriority --- diasporic location and relationship to the culture of origin --- religion and patriarchy --- the city and its history --- the history of the making and reception of the three films Fire, 1947: Earth, and Water. The various interpretations provide a base for working out the psychodynamics of the relationship of the viewer with the text, and invite the reader to participate in this multi-directional debate between reality and representation.