The Choral City: Modernity as Metacinema

This essay examines Mrinal Sen’s cinema through the concept of the ‘choral city’, arguing that cinematic modernity exceeds the filmic apparatus to become a mode of urban perception itself. Drawing on Sen’s writings and films, it conceptualises the modern city as metacinematic: a plane on which reality, memory, fantasy, technological mediation and political struggle continually enter into critical assemblages of convergence and dispersal. The spectator consequently becomes a citizen with subject–subject and subject-state visual contracts whose cinematic habits of framing, focalisation and editing participate in contests over who can see, represent and authorise reality. Focusing particularly on Sen’s Calcutta quartet— Interview , Kolkata 71 , Padatik and Chorus along with Bhuvan Shome —the essay argues that Sen’s political cinema produces ‘arrested allegories’ in which revolutionary collectivities remain heterogeneous and incomplete rather than consolidating into a unified people. In these films, Sen’s experimental practice negotiates the unstable relations between city and village, document and fiction, anthropology and revolution, producing a vernacular third-world modernism in which the political ‘people’ remains perpetually in formation.