Not quite the vanguard! Aspirations of ‘newer’ new Marathi cinema

Three recent Marathi films, Kaul: A Calling, Trijya and The Disciple , feature a noticeable discursive cinematic experimentalism. These films have opened a new front for the ongoing new wave of Marathi cinema. In an attempt to conjecture the aesthetic and expressive differences of this unfolding trend, this article develops an interrogation of two ideas of new filmmaking in the regional context. The spatio-temporal dynamics in these films is interpreted in terms of reflexivity, which implicates the contemporary as a subjectivity. It is argued that the contemporary ‘perceptiveness’ about high capitalism, its overwhelming ‘reality’, can be read in narratives that present floundering personal aspirations. Moreover, the constitutive trope of ‘passage’ in these films allegorizes present-day scenarios since they reflect states of indecision and perplexity through textural and sensuous detailing of image and sound. The article contends that the films’ experiential mode, in which affect is articulated through spatial forms to trigger a redistribution of the sensuous, aligns them with the affective turn in art cinema indicative of a new textual politics where affectivity is the charge of narratives.