Social Realism and After tells the story of how cinema—as a cultural institution and medium of representation—became a key site for mediating the political in Kerala during the 1950s and 1960s, as the region was reimagined as a modern polity. This cinematic mediation of the political took two modes. The first mode, instantiated in social realism, used cinema’s visual economy to translate the Progressive Left’s vision for modern Kerala into spatial, temporal and relational terms. The second, inaugurated in Chemmeen and carried forward by the New Wave, elevates the untameable margins of reality, staging a new encounter between the real and the spectator—a gap it makes felt rather than closes. This offers a new, affective mode of feeling political, eagerly embraced by civil society.

Bookended by Jeevitha Nouka (1951) and Chemmeen (1965), the book traces a prehistory before the 1950s and a legacy shaping the New Wave and middlebrow cinema thereafter. This is one of the first book-length studies of Malayalam cinema.

Jenson Joseph teaches at Dhirubhai Ambani University (DAU, formerly DA-IICT), Gandhinagar, Gujarat.

List of Images
Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. ‘So That the Show Can Go On …’
Jeevitha Nouka and the Figure of the Film

2. Cultural Producer as Protagonist
Neelakkuyil and the Aesthetic of Social Realism

3. The Contemplative Viewer, Modernity, and Urban Space as a Tool

4. Martyr Narratives and the Middle Aesthetics of Integration

5. Phantoms of Faith and Sentiment
Bhargaveenilayam as a Political Film

6. The Cinematic Sublime as the New Political
On Chemmeen’s Iconicity

Epilogue
Montage, Image, Verisimilitude: On Some Dominant Modes of Cinema Practice in Malayalam

Bibliography
Index