Re-viewingHer Nights: Modes of excess in Indian cinema

Abstract

This paper analyzes the debates around the regional language film Avalude Ravukal (Her Nights, d. I.V. Sasi, 1978), a controversial film produced by the Kerala film industry credited as being responsible for launching soft-porn cinema as a genre in India. This paper tracks the shifting circuits of Avalude Ravukal and its fractured aesthetic codes to analyze the role of cultural production in configuring the regional public sphere. The intertextual network of Avalude Ravukal and its reception, functions as a live archive of popular memory through which I can track the mutually constitutive relationship between the ‘excesses’ of cinema and moral anxieties within regional publics, especially around the figure of the prostitute. The paper demonstrates that in order to map the non-linear histories of Indian cinema, it is necessary to examine how this medium is enmeshed in vernacular socialities within the heterogeneous space of the nation.

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