The Epistemology of Darkness: Many Meanings of Night in Malayalam Cinema
Chalachitra Sameeksha|March 2023
Drawing on darkness/night as a conceptual framework and a socially mediated space/time, the current paper is an attempt to analyze how Kumbalangi Nights (2019), a contemporary cinema in the Malayalam language, aesthetically and politically redefine the dominant meaning(s) of darkness/night in the discourses of Malayalam Cinema (hereafter MC).
Rajesh James, Malavika P. Pillai
The Epistemology of Darkness: Many Meanings of Night in Malayalam Cinema

Thus, the paper explores how Kumbalangi Nights deconstructs the conventional association of darkness/night with unfamiliarity, evil, danger, and immorality among others and reimagines darkness/night as a physically and psychologically liberating counterhegemonic space for many from the panopticon gaze of the powerful and their surveillance consciousness. Along with this, the paper also enumerates the visual representation of night in the film which captures the aesthetics of darkness and its subliminal qualities that de-territorialize the conventional aesthetics of darkness/night as a vacuum or as the unrepresentable. While doing that, the paper also traces how the typical meaning of night/darkness has changed historically in MC and its engagement with darkness/night over the years.

Epistemology of the Darkness/Night

This story is from the March 2023 edition of Chalachitra Sameeksha.

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This story is from the March 2023 edition of Chalachitra Sameeksha.

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