Tracing Bergman in Contemporary Indian Cinema: Philosophical Cross-Connections in Through a Glass Darkly, Ship of Theseus and Dear Molly

ABSTRACT

Ingmar Bergman’s cinema has most often been framed within strictures of a Eurocentric scholarly template and structuralist or modernist philosophical approaches. Meanwhile, the filmmaker’s monumental influence on and relevance to global cinema beyond the West has often been overlooked or elided in Anglophone writing. Against the canvas of this gap in scholarship, this article ultimately discloses how Bergman’s fairly well-known filmic influence on Indian Bengali arthouse auteur Satyajit Ray was not an arbitrarily evanescent one-off. The trace of Bergman’s cinematic imprimatur – particularly, I will argue, Through a Glass Darkly – is also legible in India’s new independent cinema, exemplified by two films analyzed ahead: Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus and Gajendra Ahire’s Dear Molly. These films’ translocation of storyline segments to Sweden and portrayals of the Scandinavian landscape testify to the trace of Bergman that haunts such Indian film narratives. Through comparative close textual analyses, this study maps intertwining threads of existential and nihilism-engaged philosophies combined with esthetic aspects connecting the three films, to demonstrate the enduring cinematic impact and resonance of Bergman’s cinema beyond the Western sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Bergman
• India
• independent Indian cinema
• Satyajit Ray
• aporia
• Ship of Theseus
• Through a Glass Darkly
• Dear Molly

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Ashvin Devasundaram

Dr Ashvin Devasundaram is Senior Lecturer in World Cinema at Queen Mary University of London. He is author of India's New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid (Routledge, 2016) and editor of Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution (Routledge, 2018). Ashvin is Associate Director of the UK Asian Film Festival – London and has directed the UK Heritage Lottery-funded documentary Movies, Memories, Magic (2018).