D Vivek Dhareshwar I Tejaswini Niranjana argues: 'Enunciation is the semiological act by which some part of a text talks to us about this text as an act' (p. 754). Metz rightly claims that the cinematic enunciation is reflexive rather than deictic. 'All figures of enunciation consist in metadiscursive folds of cinematic instances piled on top of each other' (p. 769). And yet Metz seems confused about how to clarify the nature of cinematic enunciation without inheriting the anthropomorphism of a linguistics of deictics. He inherits this confusion, or so ^ g it seems to us, from the linguistic monism of semiology. Gilles Deleuze, who opts for Peirceian semiotics precisely to avoid this confusion, offers a diagnosis of the confusion inherited by a semiology of cinema: 'We ... have to define, not semiology, but "semiotics", as the system of images and signs independent of language in general. When we recall that linguistics is only part of semiotics, we no longer mean, as for semiology, that there are languages without a language system, but that the language sytem only exists in its reaction to a non-language-material that it transforms. This is why utterances and narrations are not a given of visible images, but a consequence which flows from this reaction' (emphasis original). Cinema 2: The Time-Image, (Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1989, p. 29. This has implications for how to read or theorize the film. The Metzian position tends to reduce the semiotic enunciation of dnema into an optics, on the one hand, and into quasi-linguistics narratology, on the other. On the former reduction, see Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994, pp. 21-38. Our approach here has been positioned against formalism: the punishing shot by shot analysis which describes the diegetic movement, the different kind of shots, editing, etc. — which is an attempt to recontain the political, antagonistic meaning. This formalism is then supplemented by running around with a tape-recorder (or high tech video-audio equipment) in search of audience response (under the new and exalted name of the study of the public sphere). It would be unfortunate indeed if the impasses of narratology in literary studies were to be replicated in film theory. We prefer Deleuze's conception of film-theory as 'interference', rather than as 'application'. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 280. 4. See Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetics , British Film Institute, London, 1992. 5. Deleuze's remarks (Cinema 2, pp. 188-203,276) on the cinema of the body and its link to time-image — the image that presents time directly as distinct from the movement-image which presents it indirectly — are especially illuminating in this context: 'But there is another pole to the body, to mount a camera on the body, takes on a different sense: it is no longer a matter of following and trailing everyday body, but of making it pass through a ceremony, of introducing it into a glass cage or a crystal, of imposing a carnival or a masquerade on it which makes it into a grotesque body, but also brings out of it a gracious and glorious body....' (p. 190). The attitude of the body is like a time-image, the one which puts the before and after in the body, the series of time....' (p. 195)'... there are now only attitudes of bodies, corporeal postures forming series, and a gest which connects them together as limit' (p. 276). 6. The name is an unmistakably Telugu one, and is common to both the Tamil and Telugu versions of the film. In the Tamil version, the Telugu Governor who is trying to destabilize the state is an obvious reference to how the ruling AIADMK, to which producer Kunjumon is dose, sees the Telugu Governor of Tamilnadu, Channa Reddy. 7. See for example Gyanendra Pandey, 'In Defence of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today', Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number, Vol. XXVI, 11-12, March 1991, pp. 559-72. 8. On the two sides of the law, see Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, Verso, London, 1994, ch. 3. 9. Madhava Prasad, 'The State and Culture: Hindi Cinema in the Passive Revolution', unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pittsburgh, 1994, p. 3. Henceforth cited in the text as SCH. Number 29