Shakti Samanta’s Aradhana, faithful to the tradition of the maternal melo­drama, is a narrative of excess: a woman’s acute suffering, her sacrifices, and— a favourite theme in Hindi cinema—her intense love for her son. The film begins with passionate arguments in court, where the female protagonist, Vandana (Sharmila Tagore), is on trial. As the credits […]

JYOTIKA VIRDI [ 14 ] The academic interest in popular Hindi cinema’s dramatic reinscription of women as avenging daredevils, although belated, is welcome. The increasing popularity of these films in the 1980s and 1990s is accompanied by some tur­moil over how to read this move (Ghosh 1996; Gopal 1997; Gopalan 1997).2 Per­sisting complaints about static […]

Run, daughter of horror, run from your crime. But behind you the police­man with the face of your father, the face of your first victim. Pursuing you relentlessly through your haunted dreams. Hunting you mercilessly through the twisted corridors of your tortured mind. The horror that will track you down! The horror that will destroy […]

Come, let me take you by the arm and show you the bed of evil you sprang from. Let me take you back to when you were a little girl. Let me show you—your father. Let me show you—your mother. Marked! Marked forever, daughter of horror. In his essay, “Lady, Beware: Paths through the Female […]

In terms of sheer quantity, it is clear that male psycho-killers have dominated the tradition of what has come to be known as “realist” horror cinema in the United States—a tradition popularized by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (i960), in which the impossible, supernatural monsters of earlier horror films were replaced by antagonists of an apparently (or […]

STEVEN JAY SCHNEIDER [ 13 ] Come with me into the tormented, haunted, half-lit night of the insane.. . .Let me take you into the mind of a woman who is mad. You may not recognize some things in this world. And the faces will look strange to you. For this is a place where […]

While murder is not unknown in martial arts films, it is not synonymous with (or the ultimate aim of) the violence in the films’ narratives and spectacles. Skill and virtue—including the all-important virtues of diligence and humility in the practice of one’s kungfu skills—are traditionally what will triumph, for the goal of perfecting martial arts […]

Wing Chun is a style of kungfu that is only a few generations old; its his­torical record is well, if variously, documented. A popular version has it that, during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), when oppression and cruelty were a daily norm, abbess Ng Mui from the Shaolin Temple was forced in 1674 to take refuge […]

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, dir. Ang Lee) The women of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fly high, fast, and far. The film is ostensibly about freedom, particularly feminine freedom, so it is worth noting that the three female protagonists live entirely outside the feminine mainstream of Chinese society—of that or any time. Women’s freedom is […]

For as long as I can remember, martial artists in the movies have been defy­ing the laws of physics, breaking boulders with their fists, knocking down giant trees with their feet, and slicing through steel with their swords, battling on—for good or for evil—until some slight advantage that the virtuous pos­sesses reveals itself to triumph […]