Ritual as Intermedial Interjection in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star

Series Film and Media Studies Issues Volume 24, 2023 – Uncanny Intermediality Ritual as Intermedial Interjection in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star

Volume 24, 2023 – Uncanny Intermediality

Sanskriti Chattopadhyay, Deb Kamal Ganguly

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 24 (2023) 131–155

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2023-0017

Abstract. The experience of the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976), one of the most unusual filmmakers from South Asia, raises a significant issue, of how ritual can be considered a potent medium to have an intermedial effect within the complex mediality of cinema. The authors examine his film, The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960), and show that in order to reach the “screaming point” of his “epic melodrama,” Ghatak borrowed form a forgotten ritual a fragment of a ritualistic song to become the experiential core for the experience of the film. The recurrent refrain of the song, at times the abstracted melody from the song creates a space of uncanny in-betweenness, contrasting positions of anthropological distance to a forgotten ritual with an imaginative yet guilt-ridden, painful projection of the secular self, being a part of that ritual itself.

Keywords: intermediality, Ritwik Ghatak, uncanny, ritual and cinema

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Volume 24, 2023 – Uncanny Intermediality

Uncanny (Inter)Mediality and Photo Futures, Arild Fetveit Uncanny Colours of the Past. Phenomenological Notes on Remediation and Colourization of Black-and-White Footage, Kamilla Simor The Uncanniness of Intermediality. Joanna Hogg’s Eerily Self-Reflexive Cinema, Ágnes Pethő Filial Care and Familial Postmemory. On the Uncanny and Affective Intermediality of Analogue Media Use in Recent European Documentaries, Melinda Blos-Jáni The Crisis of Care and Uncanny Intersensuality in Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken, Judit Pieldner Rural Landscapes and Affective Encounters in Radu Muntean’s Film, Întregalde, Katalin Sándor Ritual as Intermedial Interjection in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star, Sanskriti Chattopadhyay, Deb Kamal Ganguly Jane Austen and the Uncanny: The Colonial Past in Patricia Rozema’s Adaptation, Mansfield Park, Polina Rybina Media Representation and Affective Intermediality in Der Tote im Bunker and Vielleicht Esther, Giulia Bigongiari Medium Specific Uncanny in Contemporary Video Games, Tamás Csönge Pandora’s Myth and Cultural Trauma in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Boglárka Farkas Framing Anxiety. Intermedial Techniques of the Uncanny, Michaela Wünsch Front pages in PDF, Inside covers in PDF,

Ritual as Intermedial Interjection in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star - Acta Universitatis Sapientiae