Viewing a film can be thought of as a game played between the spectator and the director. The game comprises of the director intentionally constructing the shot, whilst the spectator tries to predict the next shot via the cut.<\/p>\n
Of late, there has been a renaissance of a metaphysical form of cinema that appropriates space as time; following the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze\u2019s Cinema books: L\u2019image-mouvement<\/em> and L\u2019image-temps<\/em>. This approach popularized by the films, writings and discourses of Mani Kaul, has been the only consistent critique of the realism of Satyajit Ray in India. Contrary to the metaphysical approach to film is the dialectical approach, in which space and time conflict and contradict with one another, or form dialectic<\/em>. G.W.F Hegel developed dialectical materialism, later taken up by Karl Marx in his critiques of capitalism.<\/p>\n Dialectical cinema, pioneered in the silent films of Sergei Eisenstein, could only find its first \u2018talkie\u2019 in Vselovod Pudovkin\u2019s Dezertir<\/em>. In this film, image and sound are in conflicting relationships with one another. In Indian cinema, a uniquely local approach to dialectical cinema was developed notably in Ritwik Ghatak\u2019s Meghe Dhaka Tara<\/em>, which finds its color counterpoint in Kumar Shahani\u2019s Maya Darpan<\/em>. In the latter, space and time provides a rational basis to history, rooted in Hegel\u2019s dialectic, such that myth and reality form the space for the circular enfolding of History.<\/p>\n In Sthalpuran <\/em>(Chronicle of Space<\/em>), director Akshay Indikar weaves a dialectical cinema that is closer to the conceptual empiricism of David Hume, in which experience is the only basis of determining the \u2018reality\u2019 of space and time. This \u2018chronicle\u2019 is precisely the narrative, forwarded by the Marathi inter-titles; whereas \u2018space\u2019 is the location-space, which is nothing but matter occupying a degree of intensity. In other words, narrative and matter, combined with Indikar\u2019s unique approach to the two, raise several important questions to the nature of cinematographic practice, namely: What is the relationship between depth-of-field (as in the films of Orson Welles) and a flattening of space (as in the films of Jean-Luc Godard) and can the two find a cinematographic relationship? Is a static shot in between a track and a handheld pan? Can time be frozen via the indexical<\/em> (the stopped clocks that are a physical proof of time but do not work) instead of the symbolic<\/em>?<\/p>\n