Open AccessPlaintive Survival under Panoptical Surveillance: A Reading of Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear.
Author(s) -
Aparna Thomas
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
smart moves journal ijellh
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2582-4406
pISSN - 2582-3574
DOI - 10.24113/ijellh.v7i1.6285
Subject(s) - gaze , reading (process) , movie theater , power (physics) , identity (music) , bengali , relation (database) , media studies , aesthetics , sociology , art , literature , psychology , political science , law , computer science , psychoanalysis , artificial intelligence , physics , quantum mechanics , database
This paper is an attempt to explore how the powerful gaze of the panoptical power relation through the technological aids of this neocolonial era which forms the ‘Self,’ distorts the identity, privacy and liberty of the lives under this surveillance who becomes the ‘other’. The study is based on the reading of Rituparno Ghosh’s 2007 English–language film The Last Lear. The film which won the National Award of India for the best feature film in English in 2007 is based on a 1985 Bengali play, Ajker Shajahan ( Today’s Shakespeare) written by Utpala Dutt. The film unfolds the story of an aging Shakespearean actor persuaded by a young ambitious director to take up acting again. But the retired actor is unwilling to adjust the new world of cinema and its complex technical tricks. The film also expose how the powerful camera gaze and mobile phones turn as the new colonizer who distorts truth and induce fears in the minds of the people under surveillance. This study is carried out based on the Post-Panoptical theories of Surveillance.