10 · 01 · 09

Bollywood, music and insects

Administrador

By Clara Sánchez
The panel Adaptation (Cinematic and Societal) with simultaneous translation was presented Friday at the 5th International Congress on Film Theory and Analysis.
Those participating in the panel included: Sheetal Majthia with her work Visual Vanguards Adaptations Of Progressive Writing Into Film; Jacqueline Ávila from the University of California at Riverside with The Sounds of the Prostitute: Music and Meaning in Antonio Moreno's Santa, and James Ramey of the UAM Cuajimalpa with Buñuel' s Etnomological Eye in Un chien andalou.

Jacqueline Ávila spoke about how music can substitute situations and emotions. "For example in Santa danzón is turned into a 1939 sex scene, in substitution of nudism which at that time was very new in Mexican film," she said.

Sheetal Majthia said that production processes are often altered to guarantee better opportunities for distribution. She used the example of Slumdog Millionaire, a film made in India, a country whose movies generally incorporate a lot of music. But since U.S. filmmaker Danny Boyle directed the film, this concept was eliminated.

"The lightness of the music of Bollywood owes to the fact that it is very recent when people, for example, can kiss on the screen and music used to fill those spaces of sexual tension, romance, and other things," she said. "In India, music unifies and gives identity, perhaps this is why Boyle omits it so that the film might be better received outside that country."

Ramey presented an interesting relationship between Un perro andaluz and the evolutionary process of the Acherontia Átropos butterfly, known as the skull sphinx, and the growth of the characters in the film. He pointed to Luis Buñuel’s broad knowledge and interest in entomology in his argument.
Ramey pointed to the way Buñuel metaphorically represents the changes in the stripes of the insect, from its stage as a worm until it becomes a butterfly, through an analysis of the different elements it represents on stage.

He also compared the sexual plenitude of butterflies to that of adolescent puberty, taken from Freud, Mareuil and Batchef, characters in the film.