A comparative study of Female dancers in the East and West Films

Abstract

This dissertation, entitled “A Comparative Study of Female Dancers in the East and West Films,” explores cine dance with the female dancers in the lead role in South Asian and Western films. The researcher categorizes Yubaraj Lama- directed- Nepali film Pratigya and Sanjay Leela Bhansali-directed Indian cinema Devdas as South Asian films. The Next Dance, an American film, has been chosen to represent the Hollywood film industry. In this dissertation, I have examined cinematic techniques to unfold differences in appearances, characters, and roles of the female characters in these cinemas. This research work critically examines a reserve trajectory of representation of the female dancers in the East and the West. Contrast in cinematic representation can be seen in character representation and plot development. While watching these films in the theater, viewers can underscore and speculate differences through the shots, dialogues, camera angles, costumes, and makeup. They are observed through ideas and perspectives from Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White’s The Film Experience, where writers have studied the subtle nuances of chosen films. The researcher follows their idea on the application of cinematic techniques and interpretative strategies to analyze the events and characters' relationship in films. The study comparatively examines dance shots in the South Asian Pratigya and Devdas and the Hollywood film The Next Dance in the theoretical and conceptual frame of the culture industry of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. It is the culture industry that transforms dancers and dancing into a market product. In that line, dancers Mithila Sharma-stared- Shraddha in Pratigya and Madhuri Dixit-stared- Chandramukhi in Devdas become the products of demand and supply in capitalist market. In The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, Adorno and Horkheimer state that movies and radios act as the promoters of art but in reality, they are just business associations running after the ideology of capitalism. The film, is only possible by the blatant cash investment. To secure their invested economy the makers create the strategies. In such anything in the cinema can be the product for the demand of public. In a similar vein, the selected South Asian films seem to follow the idea of Adorno and Horkheimer since Lama and Bhansali look similar in converting women dancers into glittering appearances with their sensual bodies in front of camera. Nevertheless, The Next Dance denies body exposition. This cinema stands in the meaning of dance, which is “expression” as stated by Maxine-Sheets-Johnstone in The Phenomenology of Dance. Johnstone iteratively confirms that dance is an art. However, this definition seems molded in the East in comparison to the West, despite the performances of both Sharma and Dixit in the Pratigya and Devdas are choreographed by the veteran maestros Basanta Jung Rayamajhi and Birju Maharaj. Nonetheless, the shots in the cinemas are Extreme-Close Up (ECU) shots that focus on the specific parts of women dancers that foreground their external beauty more than the dance itself. In contrast, The Next Dance features the kinesthetic movement (dance) either in the wide or Medium-Long-Shot (MLS) that underpins merely the moved body rather than any other part of the female dancer. To support the idea the paper brings the example of veteran dancer-actor Helen’s songs from the different movies and even Rakhi Sawant and Nora Fatehi from today’s date from the Indian cinemas. While as the secondary source paper chooses Save The Last Dance and Reconstruction for the Western films. The paper also introduces some female feminist theorists who raise their voices against women’s objectification in the visual, like Laura Mulvey, Lucy Irigaray, Anne Smelik, and Pallavi Chakraborty.