Contemporary Realism in Hindi Cinema

Abstract

In his Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson discusses the problem of defining realism. Realism, according to him, is mostly defined in oppositional terms: realism as opposed to idealism, fantasy, melodrama etc. hence it is difficult to settle on an agreed definition. Jameson goes on to offer a historical definition: he defines it as the project of early modernity when enlightenment and secularization were essential for the project of rationalizing the old order.^[i] In ‘The Existence of Italy’ Jameson offers us to think of the trilogy of realism-modernism-postmodernism in not only historical but also thematic way, thus allowing to see film director Alfred Hitchcock’s work as accompanying all three elements across his oeuvre.While Jameson is aware, through Sartre, that mimesis has a critical direction, that realism is not libidinally invested into the order which it depicts, he cannot resist the counter thesis that somewhere realism contains a critical attitude Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (Verso, 2013).Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (Routledge, 1992).