Blood splattered Bengal: The spectacular spurting blood of the Bangladeshi cinema

Abstract

The contemporary Bangladeshi cinema is stained red by the enthusiastic use of fake blood that erupts from bodies pictured in fist fights, gun battles and sword attacks. In this article, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in the Bangladesh film industry to illustrate the spurting of fake blood in two popular film genres: mainstream action cinema and straight-to-VCD rural crime stories (kiccha pala VCDs). I suggest that the affective intensity ascribed to blood by film insiders points to the capacity of blood to lend force to the protean and submerged discourses of contemporary Bangladesh presented in these blood-splattered genres. These film forms make use of the excessive and abject quality inherent in this bodily tissue as well as interacting with more regimented and metaphoric uses of blood in the political aesthetics of contemporary Bangladesh that they recycle and pervert.

Keywords:

• fake blood
• action cinema
• Bangladesh
• political aesthetics
• kiccha pala VCDs

Acknowledgement

This article would not have been written without the enthusiastic encouragement, incredible intellectual generosity and infinite patience of the wonderful Jacob Copeman.

Notes

1 This national day of mourning is only observed when Sheikh Hasina's party is in power; when the rival BNP is in power, they celebrate their leader Khaleda Zia's birthday on that day, in spite of widespread speculation that this is not the day of her birth.